Dead Space: Ishimura
by Mikells
Summary: When the USG Ishimura went silent in the Aegis system, the CEC decided to send a team to investigate the cause. Upon arriving on the great ship, Isaac Clark and crew discover that their problems are much more than just a communications failure.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

* * *

><p>"<em>Isaac, it's me. I wish I could talk to you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything. I wish I could just talk to someone. It's all falling apart here; I can't believe what's happening. It's strange … such a little thing …"<em>

_ -Nicole Brennan, Senior Medical Officer; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>Isaac Clarke sat on the edge of his bunk. His face was a complete blank as he stared with wide eyes at the bluish holo-playback.<p>

Though holograms couldn't relay colours the way life could, Isaac could clearly see past its flawed imaging. He could see the natural blonde of her hair, and the sparkling sea-blue of her eyes. He saw her soft cheeks and full lips. He saw her as if she was standing right in front of him, not quite smiling, and yet not quite sad.

He could tell from the frozen image that represented the cut-off point of the recording just how scared she was. But for all that he saw in her, he couldn't see what it was that scared her. He couldn't see any hint at all of what it was that prompted such fear.

He grunted and flicked the controls on the panel above his bunk; replaying the message for the twenty-third time since the _USG Kellion_ had picked it up mid-shock, along with a general distress call.

Nicole Brennan was a senior medical officer on board a Concordant Extraction Corporation planet-cracker, the _USG Ishimura_. It was the first of its kind, and had been in service for more than fifty years. Nicole had been assigned to the ship two years ago, upon Isaac's insistence. He'd served aboard her once before himself as a junior technician, and he knew most of her crew. So he knew that Nicole would be quick to make friends when she boarded the ship.

Several months ago, the _Ishimura_ had shocked out to find itself a planet to crack for resources to supply EarthGov. For all things, it looked and sounded to be a simple, routine rotation out.

But then the CEC had become worried. All contact with the _Ishimura_ had been unexpectedly cut off. What made that worse was that, in lieu of regular communications, the planet-cracker hadn't dispatched a shock-capable shuttle back to Titan Station to report on their progress, and the communications failure.

So the CEC decided to send a ship to investigate.

They'd called on a group of specialists to crew the shuttle. As far as Isaac knew, their mission was to board the _Ishimura_ as soon as they entered the Aegis system and determine the cause of the communications problems. Once said problems were identified, they were to be fixed, promptly.

Isaac jumped when a beep from his bunk controls sounded unexpectedly. Gathering his wits, he pressed the intercom on the panel. "Clarke," he said.

"_We're coming up on the Aegis system, Isaac,_" the sultry voice of the team's computer specialist sounded over the intercom. "_Hammond wants you up here for the landing._"

"On my way," Isaac said and shut off the intercom without waiting for the acknowledgement.

Isaac sighed and pushed himself up from his bunk and stretched his arms, rotating his shoulders to loosen up the tension that had been building since he'd first seen Nicole's message. It took him only minutes to gear up and check all of his Resource Integration Gear's systems to make sure that everything was functioning normally. Then he downloaded Nicole's last message to his RIG, picked up his helmet, and left the bunk room.

The cockpit at the other end of the hall was larger than the bunk room. The middle of the deck was open and unobstructed. Toward the front were the navigational consoles where the pilot and co-pilot were seated. Around the sides were various systems and holo-panels.

The mission's commander was a dark-skinned, bald man by the name of Zach Hammond. He had broad shoulders and strong arms. Hammond was already wearing his military RIG, but his helmet, Isaac had seen, was still on his bunk at the back of the ship. His hand rested on the holstered Divet pistol strapped to the outside of his thigh. Isaac couldn't exactly see from his angle, but it looked like Hammond was once more going over the mission brief regarding the _Ishimura_ and its planned planet crack.

Hammond's default XO for the mission was the woman that had called Isaac to the bridge. She was a computer specialist assigned to the team by someone in the CEC. Isaac had forgotten her name, but she seemed likeable enough; cheery, even. In fact, she was perhaps the only one on board that was confident that there was nothing wrong with the planet-cracker, and that they would find when they got there that they'd been sent for nothing.

Isaac nodded to her when she looked at him, and then sat down in a vacant seat at the back of the cockpit, nearest to where he'd entered.

Looking around, he noticed that no one else seemed to pay his arrival much mind. In fact, he doubted that the pilot, Chen Isamato, or the co-pilot, David Johnston, had even known. Both of them were paying more attention to their instruments, and to the white-blue tunnel outside the ship that was consistent with ShockPoint travel.

Isaac refused to let the beautiful whirling colours hypnotise him, and keyed in an instruction on the wrist pad on his RIG. A holoscreen popped up in front of his face, and Nicole's message played for the twenty-forth time.

When it was over, Isaac readied himself to hit the _replay_ control, but was distracted when the woman on their team spoke to him.

"How many times have you watched that thing?" she asked politely. Out of the corner of his eye, Isaac saw Hammond shoot a glance his way.

"A few," Isaac said with a shrug.

"I guess you really miss her," the woman said. "Don't worry. We're almost there. You'll be able to look her up once we're on board." She paused for a moment, and the corner of her lips pulled up into a sly smile. "Sounds like you two have a lot of catching up to do."

Isaac smiled in return.

"Prepare for de-shock, everyone," Chen called from the pilot's station.

Isaac gripped the armrests of the chair and the woman standing in front of him reached up to grab hold of an overhead guard. Hammond, who had since moved to stand behind the co-pilot's seat, gripped it with both hands to steady himself. The ship lurched slightly and the bright whorls of shock-space melted away to reveal normal space.

Isaac frowned when he saw what greeted them.

The planet of Aegis 7 was massive, even at the distance they'd come out of shock-space. Most of their path to the planet itself was littered with chunks of rock of varying sizes and shapes. The debris shifted and drifted around them as they passed, smaller pieces bouncing harmlessly off the _Kellion_'s hull with tiny clangs or thuds.

"Alright everyone, we're here," Hammond said, pointing out the obvious.

"Syncing our orbit now," Johnston reported from his station in front of Hammond. The woman turned away from Isaac and walked over to stand next to Hammond, behind Chen's station.

"All this trouble over that chunk of rock," she sighed.

Hammond frowned as he turned side-on to look at her. "Deep space mining is a lucrative business, Miss Daniels," he said, disapproving of her comment. "Aegis Seven is a goldmine, according to prospectors' reports; cobalt, silicon, osmium."

He turned back to the forward window and looked out and around, searching for something as Chen ducked the shuttle under a chunk of wildly rotating rock.

"Now, where is she?" Hammond muttered quietly. As they came around the other side of the dancing rock, Hammond pointed out through the window at something in the distance. "There she is. We have visual contact," he added for the record."

"So, that's the _Ishimura_," Miss Daniels said, looking out into the distance as well at the great ship that had just come out of hiding. "Impressive."

"The _USG Ishimura_; biggest planet-cracker of her class," Hammond said, emphasising the ship's full name for Daniels's benefit.

Isaac smiled at the slight rebuke, but made no amused sound to accompany it, lest he be rebuked as well. It seemed like this commander was going to be a by-the-book type. That didn't necessarily bother Isaac much. By-the-book commanding officers made sure things got done smoothly and efficiently. Captain Mathius had been much like that himself when Isaac had been assigned to the _Ishimura_ some time ago. And Isaac's direct commander had been like that was well. Nothing had ever gone wrong in that time.

"It looks like they already popped the cork," Hammond said.

He was right, Isaac noticed. The largest chunk of rock separate from the planet was suspended several hundred meters beneath the _Ishimura_, between it and the planet. There was no missing the eight, bright blue beams extending down from the _Ishimura_'s tether fins to eight tether stations at equidistant points on the surface of the rock chunk. The gravity tethers were designed to hook a section of a planet like a fisherman catches trout. Once hooked, the tether beams would then be shortened incrementally so that the result was that the ship literally tore a large enough chunk away from the planet. The result was that the magnetic core destabilised enough to shatter the planet into an asteroid field fit for mining.

It was an ingenious way of mining, and Isaac as a child had thought about joining the mining corps and serving in that capacity on a ship like the _Ishimura_. But he'd ultimately decided to become an engineer, like his father. It fulfilled him more than being a miner ever could, he figured.

"Why is it all dark," Daniels asked cautiously. "I don't see any running lights."

"Hmm," Hammond replied thoughtfully. "Corporal; take us in closer, and hail them. And stay clear of that debris field. We're here to fix _their_ ship, not the other way around."

Johnston nodded and keyed in the commands to do so. Isaac frowned as they came closer and closer, and the ship grew larger and larger. Daniels was right; there _were_ no running lights anywhere on the _Ishimura_. That in itself was indicative of a problem.

Isaac watched as Chen opened a comm. channel with the planet-cracker. "_USG Ishimura_," he started, "this is the emergency maintenance team of the _USG Kellion_, responding to your distress call. Come in _Ishimura_."

There was no response and Daniels paced in Isaac's direction and then back to Chen's seat. "You're going to need to boost the signal if their power's low."

"Yes, we know," Hammond told her. He turned to Chen. "Boost the signal." Chen did so, but still there was nothing. "More," Hammond said, prompting another set of commands under Chen's fingers.

Daniels made a curious sound after a minute of continued silence from the great ship. "I've never heard of a total communication's blackout on one of these things. You'd think with a thousand people on board, someone would pick up the phone."

A burst of static came over the comm., and Isaac cocked his head. They all listened as a short stream of something that was badly garbled came over the comm. unit, with intermittent static bursts cutting through it.

"What _is_ that?" Chen asked.

"It's a busted array, like we thought," Daniels said with conviction. "Sounds like they're having problems with their encoder. You get us down there, and Isaac and I can fix it. Forty-eight hours, max."

Hammond thought about it for a moment. Though they hadn't known each other long, Isaac knew that now was not the kind of time the mission commander would be open to suggestion. He'd already been given an option and Isaac would have to wait until he'd made a decision before putting his own thoughts in.

But beyond that, he was just so eager to get on board and find Nicole. The comm. array could wait a few hours while he did that, surely. It wasn't like there was any great rush; no one was dead or dying on board. Then again, if everything was fine, why the distress call? Why Nicole's message?

"Alright, you heard the lady," he said, looking down at Johnston and Chen. "Take us in. Let's see what needs fixing."

They were so close now that Isaac could see down the approach path to the _Ishimura_'s hangar doors. If Nicole hadn't been his main objective for being on board, he would have relished the nostalgia of being back on board the planet-cracker. He might even have looked up some of his friends to see who was still stationed on the ship and who was free for a few drinks.

There was a light jolt and a thrumming from the outer hull. "Gravity tethers engaged," Johnston reported. "Automatic docking procedures are a go."

Isaac shifted in his seat and looked once more at the holo of Nicole before he thought to shut it off. After the screen disappeared, he waited as their approached levelled out and they proceeded straight down towards the approach tunnel. All was going smoothly.

Something crashed into the hull, and Isaac heard a tearing as something was shorn off the shuttle's exterior. A control holo on the starboard side exploded and disappeared, sending debris shooting across the deck and almost taking out Hammond's and Daniels's heads. The entire shuttle shuddered violently.

"What the hell?" Hammond demanded over the sound of the blaring alarms.

"Sir—the autodock!" Johnston exclaimed, panicked.

"What is it?" Hammond asked.

"We're off track! We're going to hit the hull!"

Everything was happening too fast. The _Ishimura_'s approach tunnel was speeding towards them, and the shuttle wasn't levelling out to travel along it. Instead, it was taking a direct nosedive towards the hull.

"Hit the blast shields!" Hammond ordered quickly.

Responding instantly, Chen hit the right controls and the blast screens clamped down over the window, shielding them all from any bright flashes or objects thrown through the glass. A holoscreen flickered to life between the pilots and the screen.

"That guidance scanner's damaged. Switch to manual, now."

Isaac pulled his straps over his shoulders and clipped them into the clasp he pulled up from the chair on his left side. He gave the straps a tug to make sure they were secured properly. He gripped the armrests as they continued to swerve back and forth, out of control toward the hangar.

"Inside the magnetic field?" Daniels exclaimed, incredulous. "Are you insane? Abort!"

"No!" Hammond countered with a chopping motion. "We can make it inside!" He turned back to Johnston. "Corporal, I gave you an order!"

Someone said something, but Isaac didn't quite catch it over the alarms and the sounds of debris clanging off the hull like rapid fire.

The ship crashed into something, and Isaac was thankful for his safety webbing as it held him secure to his seat. He heard a loud grinding, wrenching, banging, as the underside of the shuttle slid painfully on its belly across the hangar deck of the _Ishimura_. They hit more than a dozen things, and something exploded against the blast shield, sending Hammond careening sideways into Daniels and knocking them both to the floor.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

* * *

><p>"<em>This is Benson. Everybody, listen up! They're using the vents! That's how they're getting about the ship! Stay away from—"<em>

_ "Look out!"_

_ "Get back! Get back!"_

_ "AAAIIIIEEEE!"_

_ -Benson and unknown crew member; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>Isaac didn't know how much time had passed when he regained consciousness. People were coughing, and Isaac soon realised that he was one of them. He opened his eyes and looked around to see that Daniels and Hammond were both back on their feet now and the blast screen was unclamping, opening up.<p>

"Is everyone OK?" Hammond's voice penetrated the fog in front of Isaac's eyes. He nodded his head silently, unsure if his commander was even looking his way.

"What?" Daniels exclaimed. "What the _hell_ were you thinking? Were you trying to get us killed?"

"I just _saved_ our asses, Miss Daniels," Hammond replied in that manner-of-fact tone Isaac could swear was almost a duplication of Captain Mathius. "If we'd aborted at that speed and distance, we'd have smashed right into the side of the _Ishimura_. Now settle down, and let's get to work!"

Isaac reached for the clips of the safety harness and found that they'd been bent out of shape. As such, he wasn't going to be able to detach it the normal way.

He fought down a cough, and then called out. "I could use a little help over here."

"Hold on, Isaac," Hammond said, turning away from the reddened, scowling features of our computer specialist. He drew his Divet, flicked a setting on its power output, and then trained it on Isaac's chest. He fired, and the discharge melted the safety clasp, popping it open.

Isaac disentangled himself from the straps, and ignored the clanging of the clasp pieces falling to the deck as he got up from his chair and rotated his shoulders in their cuffs to loosen them up a little once more. "Thanks," he said to Hammond. The man nodded back with a smile as he holstered his pistol.

"Corporal, report," he said, turning back to the nav stations.

"I'm not getting any readings from the port booster," Chen replied, sounding frustrated. "And we've lost comms and autopilot. It'll take some time to fix."

"Alright," Hammond said with a sigh as Daniels turned to face Isaac. "Let's get some extra hands from the flight deck to help out."

Isaac busied himself with slipping his RIG helmet into place and latching it shut. Then he checked all of the RIG's systems to make sure that they were functioning correctly after the crash. After checking on Hammond's RIG behind his back, Daniels made her way over to Isaac and gave his systems _another_ once over, irritating him almost to the point that he felt like snapping at her for it. Then he reminded himself that, as a computer specialist, she probably considered it her job.

"I'm done," she said over her shoulder to Hammond. "Clean bill of health for everyone."

"Alright," Hammond said with a cold nod to her. He followed it through with a less-cold nod to Chen, who got up from his seat. "We've still got a job to do. We're moving out."

Johnston got up from his seat as well, and both he and Chen walked past Hammond, then Daniels and Isaac toward the shuttle's midsection where the hatch was. Chen shot Isaac a cheeky smile, while Johnston merely glared at Daniels out of the corner of his eye. She didn't seem to notice, or else didn't mind, as Hammond too passed them and followed them out.

Daniels was the last to go, and she stopped for a second to smile at Isaac before leaving the shuttle as well. Isaac followed a few steps behind her.

He stepped off the shuttle's boarding ramp onto the catwalk running along the shuttle's port side. It was sturdy, but his boots, and those of the rest of the team, clanked loudly against it with each step.

The _Kellion_'s hull was blistered and scorched almost entirely along the port side. Sparks flew from holes ripped into the outer hull. Daniels, standing in place now as Isaac walked by her, winced when she looked at it. Isaac himself could barely stop himself from cursing aloud.

"_Welcome, CEC employee, to the _USG Ishimura_ …_" The sound of the flight deck's PA system took second to Isaac's ears when Daniels started to speak up behind him.

"You didn't lose power to the port booster," she said with a rueful sigh. "You _lost_ the port booster. Unbelievable!" Isaac turned and looked around her to see that she wasn't exaggerating in the smallest iota.

Where there should have been a port booster toward the rear of the ship was nothing save a gaping hole. Sticking out from that hole was a mess of cables and support struts that barely passed for what they were supposed to be.

Isaac shook his head in disbelief. He knew now that they were going to be here longer than the forty-eight hours Daniels had specified they'd need to fix the ship's comm. array. Not that he particularly had a problem with that, since it meant more time spent with Nicole … and yet, something wasn't quite right.

"Where's the flight deck crew?" he asked as he and Hammond walked side-by-side past Chen and Johnston.

"Strange," Hammond murmured beside him. "There _should_ have been a crew out here, especially after the way we came into the bay."

Isaac nodded and they stopped in front of the door to the flight lounge. Isaac waited for it to open, as it should have on automatic. It didn't.

"I guess the power's down everywhere," Hammond said with a shrug. "Kendra; get over here and hack the door locks. We need to get in."

Without a word, Daniels stepped around Isaac, taking Hammond's spot in front of the panel beside the door after he stepped out of the way. She hit a control on her RIG's wrist panel and then keyed in a sequence into the door panel. When it didn't work, she repeated the procedure. It took her four tries to get the door open, admitting them to the flight lounge.

Isaac stepped through first, eyes darting back and forth as he examined every inch of space. The flight lounge was a dichotomy of appearances. There wasn't a single person in sight; no flight crew, no operators or conductors. But there was plenty of mess. Rubbish was strewn around in places, and there were luggage cases and bags thrown onto chairs or dumped on the floor in the way.

The rest of the group followed behind Isaac, all at a slower pace and branching out around the lounge to look for clues to explain the absence of crew thus far.

"Seems like everyone was trying to pack in a hurry," Daniels said from the large door to Isaac's left.

"There should be a security detail in here," Hammond said, seemingly ignoring her.

"Yeah?" Daniels challenged. "Well there's not! There's nobody here! I can't pick up any broadcasts."

"Isaac, check out the security console back there," Hammond directed, pointing through the glass window to the operations room.

Isaac nodded and went through the nearest door to him. At a cautious pace, he advanced through the hall and around the corner to the indicated security console. He looked out through the window, watching as the rest of them continued to check out the flight lounge.

He hit the audio comm. on his RIG. "The console's still live," he said.

"_Log in and see what you can find,_" Hammond replied. "_Kendra, get the elevator back online._"

"_Power's dead!_" Kendra Daniels exclaimed. "_I can't!_"

"_Then reroute the damned power!_" Hammond snapped testily. Isaac looked up from the security holo panel in front of him to see that Hammond was glaring coldly at Daniels, daring her to reply bitingly. "_Look,_" he said, breathing through his nose, "_if we all cooperate, we can figure this out a lot sooner. Just get that computer display up, Isaac."_

Johnston, facing Isaac now, rolled his eyes and rechecked the safety on his pulse rifle before turning to his own right and taking a couple of steps in that direction.

Isaac keyed in his CEC personal identity codes in the holo panel and waited for the system to recognise them. When it did, the screen changed to show a layout of the _USG Ishimura_. Several places on the hologram were highlighted in red. Isaac knew that those places were security checkpoints throughout the ship. Isaac keyed his RIG to transmit the hologram to the others so that they could see what he was seeing.

"_Huh,_" Johnston started, seeing the hologram himself from his own RIG. "_That doesn't look good. She's taken a lot of damage._"

"_The tram system's offline,_" Hammond said. "_Getting around is going to be difficult._" He stopped and looked up and around at the air vents around the flight lounge. "_The air seems to be flowing again; that's a start._"

Isaac made to retrace his steps back to the lounge when, suddenly, the holoscreen began to flash an angry red at him. Alarms blared, both in the checkpoint he was in and out in the flight lounge where the others were. The main lights went out for all of them, and orange-yellow emergency warning lights strobed in the main lounge.

Johnston, Chen and Hammond reacted instantly, bringing their pulse rifles to bear and scanning their views for threats or hostiles. Since the rifles each had a built-in flashlight, the three of them peeled away sections of the darkness temporarily as they scanned the flight lounge. Kendra Daniels, by the other door leading to the lift, drew a Divet from its holster and began the same routine.

Isaac, the only one of them that was apparently without a weapon, felt exposed, endangered.

"_What the hell is that?_" Daniels asked nervously.

"_Automatic quarantine must have tripped from the filtration system we started,_" Hammond replied. Isaac noticed that, under possible threat, he seemed a little warmer toward Daniels. "_Everybody … relax!_"

A thud from overhead drew Isaac's attention. He looked up to see nothing save solid steel roofing. Instinctively, he backed up into the corner, and listened as the thud sounded again, this time from a few meters away.

"_What was that? Did you hear that?_" Daniels said.

"_I'm not sure,_" Hammond replied.

Sparks flew as, through the window, Isaac saw a panel of the roofing in the flight lounge break free from the rest of the ceiling and clatter to the floor. A great, pulsing mass dropped down immediately on top of it.

"_What the hell?_" Johnston said, looking _away_ from where the ceiling panel had falling right behind him, as if oblivious to it.

"_I don't know! Something's in the room with us!_" Daniels exclaimed.

Isaac saw it first. The great mass that had dropped down behind Johnston was unfurling; standing upright on two vein-covered, bloody legs. Its arms came up on either side of its body, ending in meter-long deadly spikes that looked like they could punch holes clean through any of their RIGs.

The thing came up behind Johnston, and it was then that Isaac acted. "Johnston!" he screamed into his audio transmitter. "Johnston! It's behind you!"

But it was too late. Johnston only started to turn in the direction of the coming threat as it came down upon him. It drove its long spikes into Johnston's back, one at a time, seven times in a row. Johnston managed to scream as the spikes drove into him a third and fourth time, drawing the attention of Hammond and the others.

"_Jesus! Open fire, open fire!_" Hammond shouted. The thing was faster, swiping both of its long spikes at Johnston's neck at the same time.

They cleaved through flesh and bone alike, and Johnston's head popped off like a cork, and then fell to the deck with a thud. The thing went down as well, ducking behind the lounge to avoid the incoming pulse rifle fire from both Hammond and Chen, and the single-shot fire from Daniels.

Isaac tried to block out the long, single-toned beep of Johnston's RIG transmitting his complete lack of life signs to the rest of them. Still shocked, he found himself unable to move from the corner, unable even to blink as the thing with the spikes took one bullet in the chest, then two, still kept moving as if it hadn't been touched.

"_Kendra, power!_" Hammond shouted urgently. "_Kendra!_"

"_C'mon, c'mon …_" Daniels muttered to herself over the open channel.

Finally, Isaac blinked, and moved. He stepped up to the window and watched as another fleshy, bloody thing stood up from where it had dropped down from the roof near Chen. Chen hadn't noticed it. His pulse rifle was still unloading bullet after bullet at rapid speeds in the direction of the first thing.

"Chen!" Isaac shouted. But too late. The second thing stabbed both of its spikes through Chen's upper chest plate, piercing through with no apparent difficulty until they came out through the back of his RIG.

The thing swung him around, and Isaac watched as the RIG's healthy monitor stripe declined segment by segment until there was nothing left but black.

"_Got it!_" Daniels shouted in triumph.

"_Isaac! Get the hell out of there!_" Hammond screamed at him over the channel.

Isaac reacted instantly. He dashed over to the nearby open door and looked through it, almost blinded by the sudden spark of something shorting out over his head. Then he turned and looked to the other door, only to see that the locking panel was glowing red—the quarantine, he remembered.

"_The door's unlocked! Run!_" Daniels screamed, most likely at Hammond. Isaac ignored it.

He dashed out through the open doorway and down the hall. Smoke almost obscured his view, smoked from shorting systems. Sparks lit every few steps he took, as if the systems were shorting in response to his mad dash.

An abominable roar rent the air, and a loud clang behind him made him turn. Another thing had dropped down through the roof right behind him, and was just starting to stand.

Isaac's blood was pumping. Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he quickly turned away from the new thing and dashed around the corner and down the sloping hall to another corridor.

"_Run, Isaac! Get the hell out of there!_" Daniels's voice came from his RIG.

Breathing was becoming difficult. Smoke was coming through Isaac's RIG's filtration system and burning his lungs with every gulp he took. That, plus the fact that he was running as fast as he could in full RIG gear didn't make things easy on him.

Another horrid screeching came from behind, but this time, Isaac didn't turn around to investigate the source. He wasn't stupid; he knew that it could only be one of those bloody creatures, dropping through the ceiling to come at him.

He pressed on, rushing down the corridor, pushing his muscles, pushing his lungs. He willed himself to continue. He willed himself not to die here, like Johnston and Chen just had.

Up ahead! He saw it! A lift! The panel near it glowed blue to signify that it was sitting at that level, as if waiting for Isaac to jump in.

"Thank fuck!" he breathed, pushing himself more.

The screaming of the fleshy, spiky things and the thuds of their chasing footsteps was enough to keep the adrenaline pumping in Isaac. Though, if not for his survival instinct, they might also have made his blood run cold, freezing him to the spot.

But he couldn't allow that to happen. Absolutely not! He couldn't let himself end up like Johnston and Chen.

He reached the lift and hammered down on the control panel with a closed fist. It busted, and he swore loudly. But the doors opened anyway and he stumbled forward until he crashed into the rear wall of the lift pod.

Another rabid keening made him turn to the open door. His heart froze when he saw half a dozen of the things racing each other down the corridor, their spikes slashing wildly in front of them as they vied with each other for the right to be the first to tear into Isaac's suit and flesh.

He pushed off the wall lightly and reached out to toggle the holo controls next to the door on the inside.

The doors came together with a loud clang.

"That was too close," Isaac breathed, leaning heavily against the back wall again.

He tried to get his breathing under control for a moment, closing his eyes and resting his hands on his knees for support. His lungs were still drawing great, heaving breaths of air, and Isaac couldn't exactly fault them after the adrenaline rush he'd just experienced.

Suddenly, a pair of razor-sharp spikes pierced through the gap where the doors joined together, prying the doors slowly, but powerfully, apart.

"Fuck me!" Isaac screamed. Panic took him and he hammered on the controls to shut the door over and over. The doors began to fight back against the thing's intent.

But it wasn't enough. It pried the door completely open, half-stepping into the lift. Isaac saw that it almost looked human, except that it was covered from head to foot in flesh, blood and veins. Its lower jaw was missing, and two small arm-like protuberances were growing from below its rib cage, which was partially exposed.

It screamed at Isaac, its eye sockets naught but blackened pits now, devoid of eyes entirely.

Isaac screamed back, loudly, fearfully. He knew then that this was it for him. The lift controls had failed him, the doors weren't closing. He'd seen these things stab Chen to death, and decapitate Johnston. Now, it appeared, they were going to get him too.

He wondered, only for a fraction of a second, what had become of Hammond and Daniels. Had they escaped from the flight lounge, and these horrific monsters? Or had they been skewered, their RIGs proving useless against the strong bony spikes of these fleshy things? Had Hammond taken any of them down with his rifle, or Daniels with her Divet?

Was Nicole even still alive, somewhere on board this ship? The thought entered his mind suddenly as he stared into the twin abysses of the creature's eye sockets.

It screeched at him again, and then took another shuffle-step forward towards him.

Suddenly, the doors slammed shut with an almighty clang that rang throughout the lift, the RIG's helmet, and Isaac's head all at once. The force of the doors clamping shut split the creature straight down the middle. Isaac watched as the half that was trapped inside the lift with him fell to the floor with a loud _splat_. Blood poured from the bisection, congealing around the creature on the floor and creeping slowly towards Isaac's boots.

He reached up and unsecured the clamps on his RIG's helmet, and then pulled it free. Then, dropping it without a care, he fell to his knees and vomited.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

* * *

><p>"<em>This is Benson, tram engineering. We think we've figured it out. Smith killed one! Listen, forget about shooting them in the body, you gotta cut off the limbs. Grab a cutter—anything like that. Cut them apart!"<em>

_ -Benson, Tram Engineer; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>Hammond ran backwards down the hallway as fast as he safely could. He didn't like retreating from a fight, but as he'd just seen from the way those things had just torn apart Johnston and Chen without even appearing as though they were affected by the bullets from their weapons … well, he just knew there was no other choice.<p>

Kendra Daniels was behind him … in front of him … it didn't matter. It was all relative. In either case, she led the way down the hall to the lift as Hammond covered their escape, firing at anything that followed them.

He knew it wasn't rational, but more than wanting to survive right now, he wanted to return to the flight lounge to see if his men were really dead. It wasn't rational because the larger part of him knew that they were—their RIG monitors wouldn't have flat-lined if they were still alive. Besides, he didn't truly know how either of them could have survived after what those … things … had done to him.

His RIG's audio unit crackled, reminding him that the channel between him and Isaac Clarke was still wide open. "_Fuck me!_" the engineer's voice swore loudly, panicked, over the comm.

Kendra stopped in her tracks and spun, her hair flying wildly around her in the movement. She looked down at the control panel on Hammond's RIG's wrist, and her brow, which had been furrowed in determination—determination to survive—unknotted.

"Isaac?" she said desperately. "Isaac!"

"His comm. must be busted. He can't hear us," Hammond said when there wasn't a reply. He refused to believe that yet another member of his team was lost to him.

"Or those things got to him before he could get out of there!" Kendra screamed in his face. "We have to get back to the ship! We have to get out of here!"

"Calm the fuck down, Miss Daniels!" Hammond shouted. He brought the rifle stock up to rest against his shoulder and looked down the targeting notches until one of the monsters was lined up. Then he squeezed the trigger, holding the rifle steady as it unloaded round after rapid round into the advancing monster.

One bullet went astray, and the thing's head exploded atop its shoulders.

"Got one!" Hammond cheered, lowering his rifle as the creature doubled over backwards with the hit. He and Kendra watched it as it sprung back up straight and continued to advance, headless, towards them.

"Shit!" Kendra swore.

"Get that lift up here _now_!"

"On it," she replied, darting away behind him.

Hammond followed, keeping his gun raised and letting fly with the occasional round to slow the advance of the unnatural beings.

"Here it is." Hammond stopped and looked over his shoulder to see Kendra Daniels fussing with the control panel for the lift. "I'll have it open in a minute. Just keep those things off me!"

"Easier said than done," Hammond muttered as he ejected the spent ammo clip from the pulse rifle.

He reached around his waist to the spare clip on the back of his belt, plucked it free, and slammed it into the dispenser slot on his rifle. Then he flicked the autoloader switch and unloaded a couple more rounds into the nearest creature, taking off one of its long, bony arm-spikes at the elbow joint.

It screamed at him, more angry than hurt, and charged forward on ungainly legs. Hammond unloaded another clip into one of those legs, severing it above the knee and watching, satisfied, as the thing's weight dragged it down to the deck with a wet thud.

"Well, that seemed to work," he said over his shoulder as another creature stepped over its fallen comrade and advanced slowly.

"I've got it!" Kendra shouted.

Hammond heard the lift doors unclamp and slide apart behind him. Without looking back, he started to walk backwards towards it, following Kendra. Only when he was inside and the doors were closed again did he lower the rifle and check the ammo clip.

"Why aren't those things dying?" Kendra demanded of him in a tone that betrayed panic.

Hammond ignored her and ejected the new ammo clip to visually check it—the reader on his rifle was damaged. It was still more than half full, and he smiled as he slotted it back into the rifle and loaded a set of bullets from the clip into chambers.

"Why do you expect me to know?" he snapped testily.

"I—"

The doors opened again after a brief descent, and Hammond shoved Kendra back behind him with a gentle shove before he poked his head around the door and looked around. The immediate area looked to be deserted—a few drops of blood on the deck here and there, and a looked door to the right of the lift, but that was all.

He stepped out first, rifle at the ready as he scanned from left to right, floor to ceiling. If there was one lesson these creatures had taught him, it was that he couldn't just automatically expect them to attack from his level. As a security chief, and commanding officer of this mission, he should have known better anyway. But their ignorance to that simple fact had cost Chen and Johnston their lives. Hammond vowed that it would not cost him his, or Kendra's.

But then that left one more uncertainty. Had Isaac escaped the creatures, trapped in the security checkpoint as he had been? Had he found a lift or any other sort of exit and used it to escape? Or had those creatures gotten to him too? Had he failed to learn the lessons taught by the deaths of their comrades in the flight lounge? Why hadn't he answered his comm.?

"This is the tram station," Kendra pointed out, departing the lift a couple of careful steps behind Hammond.

"Can you call it up?" Hammond asked. "I want to get to the Bridge and see if those things have gotten that far yet."

"I shouldn't have to," Kendra replied. "It's motion activated. If there's someone on the departure platform, then the tram will be sent here to pick them up."

Hammond nodded to let her know that he'd heard her, and then stepped through the door-less doorway into the departures waiting room. The seats were all empty, with no signs they'd been occupied recently at all. A few cases lay scattered about, and a couple of dropped ammo clips compatible with Hammond's pulse rifle. He picked them up and clipped them to his belt, just in case.

"There's nobody here."

"Way to state the obvious," Kendra replied, scowling at him.

Hammond left the waiting room and walked around the windowed wall toward the actual platform itself. Kendra followed him, looking around with her Divet in hand.

"How long would it take for the tram to arrive?" Hammond asked her.

"It's not coming." Hammond whirled around to face her and demanded an explanation at once. "Look," she said simply, nodding across the tracks to a display holo above the opposite wall.

Hammond sighed. The track was redlined, and the diagram of the tram above it was blinking, indicating that it was non-functional. "Great," he breathed angrily. "Just great. So how to do we get to the Bridge now?"

Before Kendra had a chance to reply, a screech and a hum caught Hammond's attention, and he turned around to see that part of the wall was peeling away from the rest, revealing waist-high windows behind them. And through those windows …

"Isaac! Isaac!" Kendra called.

The moving figure on the other side of the windows, wearing a recognisable engineers RIG, stopped moving and turned to face them. Isaac Clarke's helmet was off, and he grinned broadly as he looked across at them.

"I can't believe he made it," Kendra said to Hammond, looking at him sidelong.

Hammond keyed in his visual comm. on the RIG to Isaac's RIG, and a holoscreen appeared before him, showing the weary, disturbed-looking face of the engineer. "Isaac," he started, smiling. "Huh! We ran into more of them on the way over here. Are you OK?"

"_Yeah, Cap,_" Isaac said, almost cheerfully.

"More what?" Kendra interrupted. "What the hell are those things? Is that the crew?"

"Keep your voice down," Hammond snapped. "Whatever they are, they're not friendly. And half the doors on this ship are locked because of the quarantine." He looked back down at the holoscreen, and Isaac, to see that the other man was looking around, assessing his own surroundings. "Now, Isaac, we have to get to the Bridge. But first, you've got to repair the tram system."

"You're _crazy_, Hammond!" Kendra exclaimed. "You're going to get us all killed!"

Hammond turned his head and glared at her. "If you listen to me, I will get you out of here alive!" She didn't respond, but she did return his glare with one of her own. "Now, what's wrong with the tram?"

Kendra went to a nearby panel and linked her RIG's system up to perform the necessary analysis. Hammond watched, aware of how much patience was eaten away by her incessant challenges to his orders. She was going to have to be brought in line sooner or later, and Hammond knew that someone with her skills was better as an ally than as an enemy. But she needed to understand that _he_ was in command of the mission, not her. There was a chain of command that needed to be followed and civilian or not, Kendra Daniels was going to follow it one way or the other.

Hammond heard the completion beep of her RIG's analysis of the system, followed by a short sigh from Kendra. "The data board's fried. According to the system, there should be a spare in the maintenance bay."

"_All right, then,_" Isaac said over the vid channel, "_all I need to do is grab that spare. I know my way to the maintenance bay, it's no problem._"

"But," Kendra started, louder, "there's also a broken tram blocking this tunnel, which needs to be repaired."

"Then we'll do that," Hammond suggested.

"Damn it, Hammond!" Kendra swore. "Everything we need to do is on the other side of this quarantine! We can't reach it from here!"

"We can't," Hammond replied with an affirming nod. "But Isaac can." He turned back to the holoscreen to see Isaac looking straight back at him. "Isaac, if I can get to the Bridge, I should be able to access the personnel files. You fix the tram, and I'll help you find Nicole."

"_I'll get right on it,_" Isaac said with a nod and a smile. Hammond was grateful that at least _he_ wasn't shaken up too much by those alien things.

"Are you armed?" Kendra asked. "Those things aren't just going to let you walk right past them."

Isaac held up something for them both to see. "_Plasma cutter,_" he told them. "_I picked it up on my way down here. It seems to do the job so far. But it hasn't got much charge._"

"Do what you can," Hammond said with a nod. "You might find charges for it in storage lockers or wherever. I suggest you pick up something stronger if you come across it though. A single-shot cutter isn't going to do you much good if they decide to swarm on your location."

"_Gotcha,_" Isaac said. Then he was gone, and the holoscreen disappeared. Hammond looked out across the tracks to see Isaac saluting casually back at him before he dashed across the room to another door and disappeared through it.

"And what do we do in the meantime?" Kendra asked testily. Hammond turned to look at her, frowning once more and surprised that his facial muscles hadn't already locked into that expression permanently with how often he'd done it since their approach to the _Ishimura_. "What makes you think those _things_ are just going to wait out there and leave us be?"

"I'll be surprised if they do, Miss Daniels," Hammond replied bitingly. "But the tram is the fastest way around the ship, and I think it's advisable that we don't leave the platform unguarded."

"So you just want to sit here and wait for us to be ambushed?"

"You are _armed_, Miss Daniels!" Hammond snapped. "We both are."

"Bullets don't stop those things!"

"They will slow them down, though. See what you can do about the doors while we're stuck here."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

* * *

><p>"<em>Listen up, car B is trashed. We managed to get it back to the repair depot, but now the auto-loader is fried. I need a stasis module brought down here now! If we don't get this piece of shit off the tracks, it's going to jam up the whole system!"<em>

_ -Benson, Tram Engineer; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>Isaac knew his way to the maintenance bay without having to check the RIG's scans of the deck. From tram control, he'd have to make his way toward the outer sections of the ship, through a maze of dark, almost lightless corridors and rooms. The plasma cutter gave him small comfort, its weight in his hand something of a silent reminder that he wasn't entirely useless.<p>

He revelled in the knowledge that Hammond and Daniels had made it out of the flight lounge in one piece, and that it didn't seem as though the fleshy creatures with the bony spike-arms had followed them. At least, so far, he knew he didn't really have to worry about them.

He himself had managed to destroy one of the creatures after picking up the cutter. Though, if truth be told, he wasn't entirely sure if he had killed the thing. Just because it had stopped moving, that didn't necessarily mean that he'd killed it. Maybe it had decided to let him pass, and it was quietly stalking him through the bowels of the ship.

He opened another door, and his heart leapt into his throat, choking off a surprised yelp. Someone, or rather the corpse of someone, was hanging from the ceiling just beyond the door, legs swaying lightly.

Reacting on instinct born from the need to survive whatever had happened on board this ship, Isaac raised the cutter until the line of three targeting lasers shined on the blooded torso of the hanging man or woman. There was movement overhead, scratching against the metal of the ceiling from the vents. The sound was moving away from Isaac, and he kept the plasma cutter trained, just in case it decided to return.

When he was sure that it was unlikely, he stepped through the open doorway, and around the hanging body, and proceeded on. He turned only once in the corridor, when he heard a heavy splat, and saw that the corpse had dropped from the ceiling to the floor. The crewmember's face had been torn at viciously, and his arms looked like they'd been bitten off at the wrists. But aside from those wounds and some stab wounds around the upper chest area, the body was more or less intact. Isaac shuddered, and then resumed down the corridor.

Suddenly, his RIG's comm. spat static out at him, and then Hammond's voice came through, clearly, frantically. "_Isaac, be careful,_" the mission commander said. There was a pause, permeated only by the sound of single-shot pulse rifle fire from Hammond's end. "_Shooting them in the body doesn't seem to work. Go for the limbs. Dismember them. That should do the job._"

The comm. line shut off before Isaac could reply. He found himself musing on that little titbit of help. He wondered truly now if that creature he'd "killed" earlier was truly dead at all. He hadn't thought to dismember it at the time, assuming that unloading enough plasma into its chest and head might do the job instead.

He frowned and opened the door at the end of the hall, suddenly finding himself on a section of the tram tracks running throughout the great ship. To the left of him as he stepped out onto the powered-down tracks was a barricade that was as high as his chest. It was several meters away. When he turned to the right, he saw a similar barricade located several _dozen_ meters away, blocking off another section of the track. Vent squares set into the floor at regular intervals spewed steam from cooling or cooled power conduits running beneath the tracks, which fogged Isaac's RIG helmet only slightly.

He hit the defogger on his wrist controls, and once his vision was unimpaired again, he headed down the tracks to the right. He walked slowly, eyes and plasma cutter scanning around him at all times. He expected an ambush at any second, and he couldn't bring himself to lower his guard unless he was sure that he was safe.

But, all things so far considered, where on this ship was safe anymore?

He reached another door, set into the opposite wall near the far barricade, and stopped. His boot had thumped into something on the floor, and—despite the vulnerability it presented—Isaac lowered his weapon and looked down.

Motionless by his feet was what had once been either a marine assigned to the ship's crew, or one of the _Ishimura_'s regular assigned security officers. The health monitor on his combat RIG registered no signs of life, and their severed left hand clutched tightly to a Divet. Isaac ignored it, having seen how little effect regular ammunition had on these creatures. Instead, he knelt down by the dead soldier and inspected the piece of equipment that was clamped to the topside of the corpse's RIG wrist plate.

"Hmm," he thought to himself. "This could come in handy."

Looking around again to make sure that he was safe … for now … he touched the controls on his right wrist and brought up his own RIG's system specs. Then he laid the plasma cutter down beside him, and reached out with both hands to the tech. Taking great care to pry loose the connecting latches and wires, Isaac tore the stasis control module from the fighter's wrist. He turned it over in his hands for a moment, examining every inch of it to make sure that it was still functioning. Then he planted it solidly on his left wrist plate, and used held his arm steady so that it wouldn't fall off while he used his right hand to attach wires and clamps to keep it in place.

After everything was connected, he glanced over to the RIG display to see that the new device was already registering. It showed green. Isaac shut off the hologram and then glanced at the module's energy capsule. The indicator on the capsule read as only four-fifths full, so he made a mental note to conserve the energy as best he could. He didn't know if he would ever stumble across recharge canisters.

He picked up his plasma cutter and stood up straight again. Then he stepped around the motionless former owner of the stasis module and keyed in the door release.

The door slid open fast—too fast to be normal, and then slammed shut again. Only, when it slammed shut, it reopened, and then repeated the process again, and then again.

He frowned. There was no way he was going to be making it through that door by any normal means, the way he was going. And yet, there was that stasis module he'd picked up only seconds beforehand.

So much for conserving energy, he thought to himself.

He stopped less than a meter away from the malfunctioning door, watching it slam shut and fly open over and over. He pressed a control on the stasis module, and then extended his forearm only—any more than that and the door would slice it clean off.

Thankfully, Isaac had had a lot of experience at using a stasis unit before. They were necessary for most engineering jobs. They'd originally been designed for techs and mechanics, as a matter of fact. The point was to create a stasis field around a piece of equipment that was malfunctioning so that it wouldn't endanger the engineer that had been assigned to repair it. Using it to drastically slow the spasms of the door mechanisms so that he could pass was child's play by comparison.

So that's what he did. He flexed his fingers and then pushed forward no more than a couple of centimetres. The small movement was all the device needed to register Isaac's intent, and a small, blue-white ball extended from a small emitter ring on his palm slip. The ball seemed to melt into the slamming door, and crackling energy covered its surface for a moment before the door slowed. Isaac stepped through it with easy when it opened again, and turned to watch as it slowly closed behind him. After a few more opens and closes, the stasis field wore off, and the door continued its previous spasming.

Isaac hated that. He'd hoped, though irrational as it was, that hitting the door with the stasis field might have solved its malfunction. He himself didn't have the time to slow it, pry open an access panel around the frame, and find the problem, let alone then fix it. The maintenance bay awaited him.

He shrugged, and then turned again and started up the sloping hall to its apex before stepping into the main corridor and swinging his gaze and the plasma cutter around to scan the area for threats. For now, there appeared to be none, and that made him just a little more than only slightly uneasy. Surely, those horrendous creatures wouldn't have given up on hunting him so easily?

There was a door at either end of the long corridor. The one to his right was lit in red, indicating that it was locked. Without Kendra Daniels's help, it would remain so. Isaac didn't have the expertise required to unlock it. The one to the left was lit in soft blue. That was his path, he concluded. He headed towards it slowly, taking each step with deliberate care. Just short of the unlocked door was a corridor to the right. It led to yet another locked door, so Isaac didn't bother to check it out.

The LED reader above the door scrolled along, oblivious to Isaac's presence. It read as _Tram Repair Room_, and a red-lit warning under it told Isaac what he already knew—that the tram system was malfunctioning. He paid the signage little mind as he keyed the door's release and stepped inside, again scanning the area with keen eyes and a finger on the trigger of the cutter.

"Jesus," he hissed to himself in frustration. "I'm being paranoid!" He lowered the cutter halfway and stepped up to the safety rail to look out into the bay. The autoloader arms were retracted and shut, and there was a tram on the tracks.

Confident that the area was clear of dangers at present, he walked a handful of steps to his right to the nearby control holo. He keyed in what he thought to be a reasonable command to extend the closest autoloader arm, and then watched as the command was accepted on the holo. The arm ground loudly in its socket, and then extended slowly toward the tram on the tracks, its jaws opening wide. Isaac watched it stop, and the jaws clamp down on a solid, nonslip surface, and then stay right where it was.

Typically, taking a tram off the tracks for maintenance and repair was a three-person job. Two people were to extend the arms simultaneously—which was only a recommendation, not an absolute—and the third person would stand by the master control and key in the retrieval.

So, wishing that he had two other people with him—which led to wishing that Daniels and Hammond weren't separated from him by the blasted quarantine—Isaac proceeded up the short ramp and past the master control holo.

Just as he was starting down the opposite ramp, a horrid screech rent the air, and the cooling vent set into the wall directly in front of him exploded outward. Shards of shattered metal flew in all directions, and Isaac quickly dropped to the floor to avoid having his head taken off his shoulders by one. Breathing heavily with the fresh surge of adrenaline, he pushed himself back up to his feet, only to be knocked down again as something solid and fleshy slammed into him fully.

He looked up to see the blooded, veined texture of one of those creatures up close in all its horror. Its jaw was wide open, hanging loosely from busted joints and likely held there by the thin tendons Isaac saw. The black recesses of its eye sockets stared down at him, making him cold to the core. Bony spikes pierced the ramp on either side of him, just above his shoulders. Tiny arm-like growths from the thing's midsection grasped for Isaac, but weren't close enough to make contact.

The creature roared in his face, and pulled one of its deadly spikes from the ramp. Isaac knew what it was going to do. He wasn't going to let it happen.

Roaring back to express his own anger over the deaths of his teammates, and his determination not to let that thing kill him, he pressed the muzzle of the plasma cutter flat against the shoulder joint of the raised spike and squeezed the trigger. A triple-round of plasma blasted out and went clean through the shoulder, splattering Isaac's visor with congealed blood and disgusting, necrotised flesh. He blasted again and the limb snapped free of the shoulder, clattering to the deck.

"Get _off_!" he screamed, kicking up with both feet to throw the thing off him as it howled in pain.

The other spike ripped free of the ramp with a tearing screech, and the thing stumbled back a couple of steps. Its keening quickly transformed into an enraged roar, but Isaac silenced it with a shot to the head, and then another two to cut off the thing's legs. It fell to the floor, its roar dying off to a moan, and then to silence. It didn't move again.

But Isaac couldn't stop there. Hammering footsteps on the metal behind him, the way he'd come from, alerted him to another threat. Still flat on his back, he arched his back and looked straight up, relative to his position, to see another creature charging across the ramps toward him. He brought the plasma cutter around quickly, and blasted away with three shots, severing its legs in one, its head with the second, and one arm with the third.

Its dying moans mirrored that of its comrade, and it too never moved again as congealed blood leaked from its exposed wounds, almost like gel.

Isaac looked around, weapon in hands, scanning the perimeter for more creatures. When he was sure that there were no more in the area, he allowed his muscles to relax all at once, and his arms dropped limply to the floor.

He stayed like that for a couple of minutes as he regained his breath and willed some strength back into his arms and legs. Then, using the safety rail to his left as a support, he pulled himself back to his feet and looked around again with eyes and weapon, just to be sure. Then he leaned heavily against the rail, breathing heavily still.

"Get a grip," he chanted quietly, squeezing his eyes shut. He tried as best he could to block the images of those things from his mind; tried to block the sight of their thick, congealed blood, their horrible fleshiness, and the terrifying spike-arms.

But the eyes haunted him. He found it hard to block out the sight of those deep pits of black. It was almost as if they called to him, pressing against his mind invitingly.

He pushed away from the rail and followed it around to the right, where the second autoloader control holo was. He reached out with his left hand and keyed in the right commands. Then he watched the second loader arm stretch out towards the tram, clamp down, unclamp, and then retract. The tram remained on the track with the first loader arm still attached.

"Shit!" Isaac said, slamming his fist on the rail in frustration. He keyed in the command again, and watched again as the arm extended and then retracted without maintaining its grip on the tram.

Annoyed at his failure, he hammered down on his RIG's comm. "Hammond, it's Isaac," he said. A holoscreen popped up in front of him and he saw the welcome faces of Hammond and Daniels. Both of them were still a little twitchy, he noticed, but that wasn't entirely unjustified.

"_What's the problem, Isaac,_" Hammond said, glancing over his should at Daniels.

"I'm at the tram repair station. One of the autoloader arms has a malfunction. I can't get the tram off the tracks," Isaac replied, frowning. Hammond likely couldn't see the frown through the helmet, but it was there all the same. "I can try to isolate the fault in the equipment, but that would take time, and considering I was just ambushed by a couple of those creatures, time is probably something I don't have in abundance without backup."

"_The quarantine is keeping us locked out, Isaac,_" Daniels stated from behind Hammond. "_We can't get to you. We can't even get back up to the flight lounge to work our way around to you that way._"

"_Are you OK?_" Hammond asked.

"I'm fine. That tip you gave about dismemberment really did the trick. What should I—?" And then it hit him; the solution he should really have considered on his own. Just how stupid was he?

He quickly attributed his lack of considering it to the fact that he was still reeling from the surprise attack by two of those fleshy creatures. He checked the indicator on the stasis unit attached to his wrist plate, and then looked down at the loader arm on the lower level. Then he grinned, and turned back to the holoscreen.

"Never mind," he said. "I think I just thought of a way."

"_Good man,_" Hammond replied. "_Keep the channel open, regardless._"

Isaac nodded and then touched the control again on the stasis unit. Then, he keyed in the command on the autoloader control holo, and as the arm started to extend he hit it with a stasis field to slow it down. Then, without waiting for the arm to complete its extension, he dashed up the nearby ramp to the master control holo.

Then he waited for the few extra seconds it took for the arm to complete its extension. Finally, it stopped, and clamped down on the tram's exterior. Isaac reacted instantly, not knowing exactly how long it would hold before releasing again. He hit the controls to retract the tram.

There was a loud grinding sound, followed by a pop and a crackle of discharging electricity. The autoloader arms lifted the tram a meter off the tracks, and then retracted back into their sockets, pulling the tram toward Isaac. A panel in the floor between the arms opened at the middle, and a small platform popped out from the hole with clamping mechanisms open and waiting.

The loader arms stopped when the tram was fully over the new platform, and lowered the car onto it. Isaac waited for the clamps to secure themselves to the tram's outer skin, and then hit another control. Immediately, the platform disappeared below, taking the tram down with it, and the doors clanged shut. He keyed in a few extra controls to start the auto repair.

"_Isaac, you did it!_" Kendra Daniels said enthusiastically from the comm. holo screen. "_That tram was blocking the whole system. When you get the computer online, you'll be able to call the tram from the control room._"

"I'm on my way to the maintenance bay now," Isaac replied with a nod. He could hear the faint sound of buzzing and crackling below as the auto repair equipment got to work on the tram car.

"_Good,_" Daniels replied, sighing with relief. "_The faster the better, though … I can hear something crawling around out there._"

Isaac nodded and cut off the comm. He couldn't afford to just wait here where he could be ambushed again. He wasn't suicidal.

He turned around to face the wall behind him, grateful to see a stasis recharge canister disperser unit. He thumbed the request button successive times to end up with four spare canisters, which he attached to slots around his utility belt. Then he turned back to the door he had entered through and proceeded down the ramp toward it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

* * *

><p><em>USG Ishimura Aerospace Engineering Dept.<em>

_Shuttle Repairs Invoice_

_ Mission Day Two: Faulty fore gyro, vessel _USG-ISH-503_. Replaced, now functional_

_ Mission Day Three: Faulty 40 scope, vessel _USG-ISH-501_. Still in repair._

_ Mission Day Four: Damaged landing repulsors, vessel _USG-ISH-505_. Complete replacement, now functional. Damaged fore and left-fore viewports, vessel _USG-ISH-504_. Replaced, now functional._

_ Mission Day Five: Damaged booster collar, vessel _USG-ISH-505_. Repaired, now functional._

_ Engineer's note: Wright J.F. [2__nd__ Engineer, Maintenance Bay]_

_ -Repair Invoice; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>The trek backwards was faster, since Isaac was sure of his ability to wield the plasma cutter effectively against the creatures now. He didn't stop or slow so much to check corners anymore, preferring to check them as he went. He wasted more stasis energy getting by the malfunctioning door again so that he could cross the tracks.<p>

He was ambushed again on the tracks, however. And he found himself ready for it. He was halfway across to the door at the other end of the section when a horrid howl rent the air around him. Immediately he stopped walking, and scanned the perimeter with the plasma cutter.

He soon found the perpetrator. Another thing was crawling along the wall, several meters above and in front of him. As he watched it, and as it watched him and drew closer, he noticed several distinct differences with this new creature.

For starters, it had no legs. In fact, there appeared to be only three limbs—two arms ending in a set of clawed fingers instead of bony spikes, and a long tail extending from the bottom of the hips, ending in a long sharp barb. It was darker than the standing creatures Isaac had seen thus far, and there were a couple of long, deep gashes criss-crossing its face.

He watched it carefully, keeping his eyes on it at all times as he continued ever-so-slowly toward the exit he wanted.

The thing howled at him again, and then with an almighty push, it shoved off from the wall and fell to the deck with a wet thud. Isaac backed away a few steps as quick as he could, and the thing sat there, watching him, ready to strike. Its "tail" swung wildly behind it, the deadly barb just itching to impale something.

Isaac aimed for the tail first, and two carefully placed shots took it off just below where it melded into the lower torso. The creature screeched at him, and, using its powerful arms, started to crawl across the tracks towards him. Without hesitating, Isaac took off both of the things arms, and then its head. Then he took a quick look around to make sure that there were no more of them, before he raced over to the door.

It opened to admit Isaac to the slanted corridor in which he'd seen a body fall from the ceiling earlier. With how much his suit weighed him down, he wasn't too fond of climbing it, but he knew there wasn't really an alternative. The door at the other end, thankfully, was still unlocked. At least, he thought, he wasn't going to be wasting his time.

A burst of static came from his RIG's comm., followed by a voice. "_Isaac,_" Daniels started, "_I've patched into the deck security system. It took some work, but I've got the door to the maintenance bay unlocked. The data board should be somewhere inside._"

"Got it. I'll have that tram up and running soon. Isaac out."

He shut off the comm. channel and went through the door and down the corridor he'd been in before. Bypassing the door he'd come from much earlier, he continued to the end of the hall, and then turned.

"Shit!" he swore when he saw the motionless body on the floor. The flesh was stained with blood, but there was no mistaking it for human.

Though it appeared not to have any defensive wounds or injuries, it was so perfectly still that Isaac assumed that it had been killed a while ago by the great ship's crew. Tentatively, and sticking to the wall, he started to proceed around the double swerve in the hall. To be on the safe side, before he was within reach of the thing, he unloaded a trio of shots into its head and one of its arms and legs.

He jumped at least a foot when it screamed at him after the first shot, and on reflex he unloaded several more shots into it. Breathing hard again, he backed away from the pooling blood, and then turned and rushed down the corridor and around the corner at its end.

He stopped just in time to avoid crashing into the closed lift doors, and gently touched the summons control on the holo panel to call it. It came within seconds, and the doors whirred open to admit him. He stepped inside, and then directed the lift to go down.

His comm. sounded again, and he rolled his eyes, guessing that it was likely not going to be Hammond. He wasn't disappointed. "_Isaac,_" Daniels's voice came through. "_It's Kendra. It looks like the door to the storage room is locked. There should be a key somewhere in the maintenance bay._"

The comm. switched off before he could reply, so he muttered to himself instead, "Why don't I just ask the deck crew for the key? Surely, they'd be glad to help." He rolled his eyes again, and then when the lift stopped and the doors opened, he stepped out.

Ever on guard, he scanned the area with weapon and eyes as he started forward, climbing the short ramp to an elevated catwalk. He rounded a couple of corners, sweeping his gaze constantly, and then continued on to the door at the end. It was locked, much as Daniels had warned him it would be.

Isaac looked around, searching for some place the key could be hidden. He saw a couple of bodies in the corner under the vent, mutilated and torn beyond recognition. They were human, at least; that much he could tell, but beyond that—nothing. He fought to contain his nausea as he dropped to a knee in the blood pooled around the pile of flesh and fabric and bone. Then, moving body parts around so he could search better, he felt around the heap, looking for something small, something metal.

He found the key card in the soiled trouser pocket of an engineer. He hoped that it wasn't anyone he'd known from his time on the _Ishimura_. He cleaned the key card off as best he could on the only piece of unsoiled fabric he could find, and then got back to his feet, turned back to the door, and slotted it into the reader under the panel. The light glowed blue as the door locks clicked, and Isaac opened the door and stepped inside.

The room beyond was dark, and the air was clouded slightly with steam or smoke. Isaac keyed his defogger again, and crept forward slowly, carefully.

There was a single vent, set into the wall across the room to the left. The fan behind the grill was running, however, so while it wasn't impossible, Isaac thought it highly unlikely that any of those creatures would be busting through it to surprise him. In front of him was an almost featureless wall, save for the open storage unit bolted to the wall at eye level. It was empty. Five storage lockers lined the wall just inside the door, four of them locked, and the one in the middle wide open and similarly empty. On either side of the vent was a work bench. Both of them were strewn with tools and equipment that had been in the process of being repaired when the engineers had been called away, or killed.

On the bench against the window was the thing that Isaac had come up here looking for. He walked over to the bench slowly and reached out for the prone data board. Then, on a purely paranoid reflex, he withdrew his hand but a centimetre before even touching it, flexed his fingers, and waited for a surprise attack.

There was none.

Sighing to himself, he reached the rest of the way and plucked it from the tabletop effortlessly. The data card was not at all big, and therefore lacked any significant bulk to weigh him down. He carried it in the one hand, tucking it in the crook of his arm as he turned back to the door, opened it, and walked back out into the main maintenance bay area—plasma cutter first.

Fluids still dripped from piping above and below Isaac as he retraced his steps for the lift. Grease still covered much surface area, as did blood and gore. He deliberately averted his gaze from anything that looked too small to be a threat, unwilling to vomit against the inside of his RIG's helmet visor. It wouldn't be very practical to obscure his own vision when he could come under attack at any moment.

He didn't, he soon found. While he was suspicious of that, he was grateful for it. It offered a small reprieve, if any. Enough time to collect himself, refocus his objective—his main objective: Nicole. He reached the lift without incident and punched in the summons. He was rewarded by the instantaneous opening of the lift doors, empty still and seemingly welcoming. Defying all sense of false security, he dashed into the lift and hit the command—perhaps a little harder than he intended—to send the lift back up.

The lift deposited Isaac back on the tram level maintenance and access level, and he proceeded around successive corners once more.

As he walked, he once more found himself considering the situation at hand. Thus far, there had been no sign of the _Ishimura_'s crew, except corpses. They'd only come across these strange, fleshy, alien creatures that seemed so intent on killing them all. Had these things already dealt with the great ship's crew? Had they been waiting who-knew how long for a ship just like the _Kellion_ to come aboard, providing them with fresh prey? These were interesting questions. But the _Ishimura_ had a crew of more than a thousand. And while it was true that it was a massive ship, more massive than most other big ships, it was still so unlikely that all Isaac and the others had come across so far was less than a handful of corpses in varying stages of mutilation.

He was still thinking about all of that when he found that he'd returned to the tram control room. He opened the door, shut and locked it again behind him, and then walked over to the great window overlooking the tracks. He was relieved to see both Daniels and Hammond were still on the platform on the other side of the tracks, waiting—Hammond continually on guard with his pulse rifle scanning.

Satisfied that he'd reaffirmed their continued existence, Isaac left the window and proceeded over to the tram system core, walled off from the rest of the room save the glass door that had been shattered inwards. Shards of it were all over the floor and equipment. Isaac switched his RIG's analysis devices back on and quickly scanned the entire apparatus. When he'd located the busted data board, he switched the analysis equipment off again, and then set the spare board down on one of the machine's flat surfaces to free up his hand. He gripped the fried data card, and pulled as hard as he could. It came loose with a fizzing sound. He frowned at it in disgust before dropping it carelessly to the floor.

Once he slotted the new data card in, he punched in a few commands on the holo panel, then closed the holo before stepping out of the alcove and returning to the window.

"_Tram control computer is now online,_" came the digitised, feminine voice of the ship's interactive computer core. It came from a PA speaker above the window, and Isaac eyed it with distaste for having scared him for a moment.

The holo panel before him blinked from red to blue, and he keyed in the summons commands for the tram. "_Ship-wide tram system has been reinitialised,_" the ship's computer called out to him. "_All trams are now operational. Tram arriving at flight deck station. Quarantine lifted._"

"Shit," Isaac swore, spinning on the spot and scanning the room in case some of those creatures had decided to sneak up on him. He _so_ didn't like the idea of the quarantine being taken away so suddenly. He didn't know if that meant that the creatures had left the flight deck area, but he wasn't willing to stake his life on that.

A metal grinding sound came from behind Isaac, making him jump at its suddenness. When he turned to the window again, he found that his view of the platform where Hammond and Daniels had been standing was now obscured. All he could see was the outer skin of a tram car, parked right in his way.

Isaac keyed his visual comm. with Hammond's RIG frequency to report. "_Alright, Isaac; we're on board and heading to the Bridge. Good work._"

"_Strange,_" Daniels said from behind Hammond. "_The quarantine just lifted._"

"_Whatever was in the flight lounge must have left._" Hammond shrugged and returned his gaze to Isaac. "_That's lucky for us. Isaac, get back to the Kellion and prep it for launch. We'll find out what we can from the Bridge and meet you there._"

"_If we even live that long,_" Daniels said snidely. "_You're out of your league, Hammond. This is suicide! We're going to die out here!_"

"_Your lack of confidence in me is duly noted, Miss Daniels. But I have a mission to complete, and that's exactly what I am going to do—with or without you. Do we understand each other?_"

"_Just get us out of here alive,_" Daniels muttered under her breath.

"I'll meet you both at the ship," Isaac said with a nod before he closed off the channel again.

Heading back to the flight lounge, Isaac felt the initial dread of escaping it slowly creeping upon him once more. He couldn't think of what he would find there; Chen and Johnston's bodies so carelessly mutilated, like so many of the _Ishimura_'s crew, left to rot. He couldn't let those thoughts be at the forefront of his mind, couldn't let them become so entrenched that they would make him freeze up if the things came for him again.

By the time he got to the lift, his chest felt tight, and his stomach was doing somersaults. The elevator's floor was still stained with congealed blood and Isaac's vomit, both of which made the smell pretty tough to bear. The pieces of the creature that had been trapped in the lift with him on the way down were there too, and he kicked them aside and kept his distance as the lift shot back up to the flight deck.

The tightness in his chest was still there when the lift doors whirred open again, revealing the familiar, but unwelcome, sight of the flight deck he'd escaped so desperately. The lights were even dimmer now than before, likely due to the thick steam that permeated the air and made everything so blurred to his vision.

Isaac forced himself to step out of the lift, forced himself not to dash back into it before the doors closed. When he heard it clamp shut behind him, he spared a single glance over his shoulder, and then started to walk.

He couldn't shake the unease he felt, retracing his steps. When he'd been escaping the flight lounge earlier, he hadn't had a single weapon on him, and thus hadn't inflicted any casualties. In fact, he'd been running—scared out of his mind—away from at least half a dozen or more of the things. And while he was confident now of his ability to take one out, having taken out several of the things since then, he quailed at the thought that he would be forced into a confrontation with a throng of them.

Thankfully, he found as he continued around corner beyond corner that the corridors were empty. There was no telltale, frighteningly ominous scrabbling behind the walls or the ceiling to indicate that he was being followed. There was no horrid howling as they approached him from any which direction. At one point, Isaac thought he'd seen a shadow duck around the corner ahead of him, but when he rounded it himself with his plasma cutter ready, he saw nothing safe the stretch of the corridor, and the unlocked door at its end.

He went through the door with only the briefest of pauses, and then continued on through the security checkpoint to the door leading into the flight lounge. Before, during the quarantine, the door had been locked, sealed, separating him from the rest of the team. But now that door was unlocked, and he had no trouble opening it and stepping through into the lounge.

Immediately, Isaac found himself fighting against another reflex to vomit. The floors and seats were strewn with blood and gore from the creatures' attacks on Chen and Johnston. It was thick, the blood congealing in a room made humid by long hours with little or no atmospheric recycling. Immediately, he switched on his RIG's filtering systems so that he wouldn't have to smell the carnage, or the start of the decay of—

And it was then that he realised that Chen's and Johnston's bodies were missing. Isaac had seen them both go down, and had heard the steady tone of their RIG monitoring systems flat-lining as the life drained from them. But despite that certainty, there was no proof of it. The blood and gore could have been from anyone, and not necessarily anyone that Isaac knew.

His comm. sounded again, tearing him from the horror and the wave of uncertainty that suddenly filled his mind. He keyed in the audio comm., not wanting his emotions showing too clearly to the other surviving members of the team.

"_Isaac…_" Hammond's calm voice almost made him forget about the mystery of the bodies that should have been in the flight lounge. He started around the seats in the centre of the room, towards the departure area. "_We made it to the Bridge,_" Hammond continued, oblivious to Isaac's discomfort. "_It's a mess up here—no survivors. We're going to try and get to the command computer. Wish us luck._"

He did, and keyed the controls next to the door to open it. He continued on without another word, through the open archway onto the flight deck. As he proceeded down the long catwalk to the damaged _Kellion_, he eyed his surroundings with great care. There were some small fires from damage around the lower deck and near the _Kellion_ on the walkway itself. But those fires were contained to whatever combustibles were keeping them alive. Sparks flew from gashes along the ship's outer hull where it had impacted the flight deck or debris outside. The forward window had a crack in it that Isaac hadn't noticed when he'd first left it.

But for all that, he couldn't shake the sense that he wasn't quite alone. Though he could see no evidence of the _Ishimura_'s crew, or of any of those horrible creatures, he couldn't help but feel that someone—or something—was nearby … watching him … waiting.

Ever mindful of that sense, he pressed on. The _Kellion_ seemed almost claustrophobic when Isaac boarded her. Compared to the openness of the surrounding flight deck, and the wideness of the larger ship's corridors and rooms, Isaac felt … trapped. It wasn't helped by the fact that the smaller ship was heavily damaged. He wasn't even sure it would be able to leave when they were all aboard.

He walked through its short halls to the forward area that was the cockpit, and headed straight for the controls at the front. He keyed in a sequence on the physical control panel at the pilot's station—reminded again of Chen as he did so—and a holo panel appeared right in front of his face. He keyed in another sequence, hopefully to start the ship's pre-flight check.

The holo flickered, and the _Kellion_'s schematic appeared on it, the damaged areas flashing red while other systems flashed varying shades of green and yellow to indicate their effectiveness. The ShockPoint drive seemed to be working fine, though the regular engines were only working at fifty percent capacity. It would be a long flight away from the _Ishimura_ to a safe Shock distance, but it would be worth it.

Suddenly, there was a screech, and something landed flat, almost gracefully on the outer skin of the window. Isaac panicked. Observing it in less time than it took to raise the cutter, he noticed that it was another of the two-armed-tail creatures he'd seen on the tram tracks a while ago. This one was darker than the others, almost black but just as equally frightening and bloody. It looked back at him through the window, its tail swinging wildly at its rear end, before it pushed up with both of its strong arms and started to crawl along the glass.

"_Hostile life form detected,_" the _Kellion_'s onboard computer warned him.

"Yeah, no shit!" Isaac said testily, his heart racing in his chest. The thing had disappeared from view now, and he spun around, expecting it to have climbed through the entrance and into the ship to get to him.

Just as he turned, however, something exploded. Fire and smoke billowed out into the hall he'd come from, and Isaac immediately hit the deck to avoid the worst of it. He still felt the intense heat pass over him, however, and thanked his quick reflexes.

The ship was shuddering violently all around him now. He needed to get out of there. A quick glance over his shoulder saw that the holo panel had switched off; its emitters had probably been shorted in the explosion. He dashed forward, under the plume of smoke that was in his path and around the corner and out of the ship once more. Conduits in the walls around him exploded as he ran, flames licking at the outermost plates of his RIG. He did his best to ignore them all, and to keep from tripping over his own feet as he ran.

Just as he reached the boarding ramp, a massive explosion knocked him forward. He flew over a meter in the air and crashed head-and-shoulders first into the guardrail. Sliding down to the plates of the catwalk, Isaac shook his head clear, trying to remove the dizziness he suddenly felt. Smoke was thick, dark, heavy around him, and when he found himself free of most of the dizziness, Isaac looked over his shoulder to see the forward hull of the _Kellion_ disappear as something beneath gave way. The ship crashed with a booming clang to the lower deck.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

* * *

><p>"<em>What in God's name is going on down there?"<br>"I think that's precisely the point, doctor. God's work."_

_ "I'm not so sure of that. We have to assume that the colony's problems are related to the Marker."_

_ "You can assume all you want to. I do not. The Marker is glorious and divine, you—you know that."_

_ "God moves in mysterious ways."_

_ "Anyway, we'll have it on board tomorrow. You can analyse it all you want to. What are you so worried about?"_

_ "Worried? Captain, people are dying down there. Killing each other. Is this madness the 'transformation' Unitology teaches us?"_

_ "Doctor … Terrence … there will always be risk when the stakes are high. And here, they are enormous. It could change everything."_

_ "That's what worries me."_

_ -Chief Science Officer Terrence Kyne and Captain Benjamin Mathius; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>The destruction of the shuttle quickly became the least serious of Isaac's problems. The creature that had been crawling on the outer hull of the <em>Kellion<em> had made it off before the explosions, and was suddenly on his back. Its disgustingly vein-y arms were wrapped tightly around his chest, and its tail kept his legs together and immobile as it dragged him down to the catwalk. He was vaguely aware of impacts against the RIG's shoulder plate, and looked around to see that it was trying to sink its teeth into the tough metal.

He blasted its head off with the plasma cutter, and then fell backwards to pin its body between his back and the deck plates. It howled, but its arms remained tight around his chest, trying to crush him. Isaac brought the cutter around, aimed as best he could, and severed the thing's tail. Almost instantly, its arms went slack, and he could breathe again.

An angry howling came from somewhere far off—too far to be an immediate threat. Isaac pulled himself back to his feet, and shook off the creature's corpse. It wasn't lost on him that there was blood from the creature now staining his RIG's plates.

"Great," he muttered to himself darkly. He shot the destroyed shuttle a rueful look. "Just great!"

Suddenly, Isaac's comm. holo was back up. Still caught up in the adrenaline of the creature's attack, and the sudden destruction of the _Kellion_, it took Isaac off guard, and he aimed his plasma cutter at it without thinking. When he saw that it was only Kendra Daniels, he relaxed a little, and lowered his weapon.

"_What the hell is happening down there?_" Hammond said as he came into view behind Daniels. "_What happened to the shuttle?_"

"I don't know," Isaac said, still trying to shake away the ringing in his ears. "I was starting the pre-flight, and then the entire thing just started coming apart around me. I think I heard the onboard computer mention something about a critical hull breach."

"_That was our ride home,_" Daniels snapped. "_It's the only way off this ship._"

"_Kendra …_" Hammond started.

"_No, Hammond!_" she exclaimed. "_This changes everything!_"

"_Just let me think, damn it!_" Hammond bit back testily. "_Can you access the command computer?_"

Daniels looked away as she tried something, and Isaac locked his holo so that it wouldn't switch off automatically when he started walking. He started down the catwalk slowly, and absently reached behind his belt to pluck a charge cartridge for the plasma cutter. He reloaded the cutter and checked the status dial before he re-entered the departure area of the flight lounge.

"_It's no good,_" Daniels said with an exasperated sigh. "_There's an executive lockdown of all primary systems. Without the Captain's authorisation, I can't access them._"

"_Well? Where's the Captain?_"

Daniels worked again at whatever controls weren't visible in the holo, and Isaac stopped and waited in the flight lounge. "_Here he is. Captain Benjamin Mathius. Location: Medlab. Status: deceased._"

Isaac and Hammond reacted in the same instant. "What? How?" they said together.

"_I can't access that information,_" Daniels said after a moment. "_Find the Captain, and you'll find his RIG. With his authorisation codes, I can crack this computer wide open._"

"_Damn it!_" Hammond swore, looking up at something Isaac couldn't see, or hadn't heard. "_Isaac, I'm sending the tram back to your location. Get to the Medical Deck and find that RIG as fast as you can._"

"_What was that?_" Daniels whispered suddenly, following Hammond's gaze now and staring up at the ceiling.

Isaac heard the sound of wrenching metal, and a horrid, familiar screech. But they weren't close, weren't … real. They were coming from the holo.

"_Holy shit! Come on, get out of here!_"

"Hammond?" Isaac cried. "Hammond! Daniels!" But it was no use. The screen went dead, after a brief glimpse of what looked like another one of those tailed creatures.

So now he had more work cut out for him. Now he knew that he couldn't just link up with the others, especially not now that the _Kellion_ had been destroyed. Hammond and Daniels would be trying to ascertain other ways off the ship, while he, Isaac, ran their errands for them.

But on the other hand, this one errand didn't seem such a bad one. It saddened Isaac to learn that Captain Mathius was dead. While he personally hadn't had many dealings with the captain during his time aboard, he'd deeply respected the man. He ran a good ship, commanded an excellent crew. Somehow, Isaac expected that he'd have been holed up with survivors somewhere, or that his body would have littered the decks, torn apart by the creatures as he fought alongside his crew to rid his ship of the menace. But for his body to be in the Medlab, then it only meant that he had died before the invading creatures had threatened his ship.

He shook the thoughts from his mind, attempting to clear his head as he proceeded through the flight lounge for the third time in a matter of hours. Ignoring the evidence of earlier carnage was easier now, though not by much. He found himself consciously able to avoid looking around and the pooled blood and chunks of gore.

When he approached the door leading to the tram station, opposite the security checkpoint, he opened it and stepped through into the corridor beyond. The hall was empty, save the shells of Hammond's and Daniels's spent pulse rifle and Divet ammo. Halfway the length down the hall was a turn off, and Isaac glanced down it briefly to see more blood smeared along the walls and floor, along with more gore. No spent casings there, though, and the LED above the door read as _Restrooms_, so Isaac didn't bother with it. He continued on to the lift at the end, and keyed in the summons and waited.

The lift arrived swiftly, and after Isaac was safely inside—safely being relative to the situation—he keyed the controls and waited as it whisked him down to the tram platform. Once there, he wasted no time in dashing over to the tram, which was already waiting for him, its hatch wide open and the boarding ramp extended.

He walked across the ramp and checked out the tram quickly for unwelcome guests before returning to the holo panel facing the door. It was a simple layout, and Isaac was relieved to find that it hadn't become complicated in the years since he'd been on board. The panel showed a diagram of the _Ishimura_, split off into multiple sections which were determined by tram platform locations. When he found the medical section on the diagram, he thumbed it.

The door behind him snapped shut with a hiss, followed by a dull whirring as the boarding ramp was sucked back into the tram's deck. Certain that he was, at least for the time being, safe in the cabin, Isaac fell back onto his rump on the nearest seat. He set his plasma cutter down next to him, and then set about removing his helmet. It wasn't going to be an overly long trip through the _Ishimura_, but it was enough time for him to wind down a little, and relax.

* * *

><p>The squealing of the tram's braking system told Isaac that he was close to his destination. Tram travel was still as fast as he remembered. He'd made the trip from the flight zone to medical in a matter of minutes, not nearly as much time to rest but enough to calm, a little, his hammering heart. He quickly replaced his RIG's helmet and secured it before picking up his cutter and standing.<p>

When the tram door opened, he stepped through without hesitating—and then froze.

The lights on this platform were a little subdued. When he looked up, only briefly, he saw that a few of the illumination panels set into the high ceiling had been smashed. Glass crunched under his feet. There was blood splattered against the nearby wall to Isaac's left, and the ruined, almost shredded corpse of a walking creature in the corner near the door up ahead.

But the thing that caught him off guard most was … survivors? Ahead of him, slightly at an angle to his departure, was the hall leading off the platform and into the medical section proper. It was blocked off by what looked like a couple of shelfing stacks, knocked over onto their sides. And in front of those, on the platform-side of the doorway and the blockage, lay a bloodied and mangled corpse, propped up lifelessly against someone who was clearly still alive.

The woman wore the grey-patched white outfit of the _Ishimura_'s medical staff. She had short, blonde hair to her shoulders, and a bloody bandage was wrapped around her eyes and forehead. Instantly, Isaac's gut wrenched inside him, and he rushed over to her, unable to stop himself thinking of how this woman could be the one person he hoped it wasn't. But when he checked the identity tag on her uniform, he breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't Nicole. That didn't, however, alleviate the horror at the state of the woman.

"Are you OK?" he asked her frantically, dropping to his knees and once more setting his cutter aside.

The woman paid him no mind as she turned her sightless gaze down at the dead crewmate in her arms. "Shhh …" she cooed gently, as if she thought the corpse was still alive. "Shhh, it's all right, McCoy. He's here. There's nothing to be afraid of."

She chuckled then as she ran her hand over what Isaac now realised wasn't even a complete corpse. It was bloody, and missing its arms and legs and everything above its lower jaw. But the woman didn't seem to realise this.

"I knew you'd come," she said suddenly, looking up at Isaac, though he doubted she could see him with that makeshift blindfold in place. "Just like you said! I …" she faltered and staggered back, her elbow crashing into the deck. Isaac watched helplessly as she reached around behind the body of "McCoy" and lifted something small, metallic, and functional. "I saved this … for you."

She raised her hand slowly, lifting the device higher for Isaac to grasp. But as he started to reach for it, suddenly her arm slackened. The device slipped from her slightly turned hand, and her arm fell into her lap, motionless. She gasped once, twice, and the slumped backwards against the wall.

"Do you need help, ma'am?" Isaac asked her, genuinely concerned. With the bloody rag in the way, he couldn't tell if he even knew this woman from his last stint on board. She could have been a friend.

But she ignored his words, turning her half-covered face up to the ceiling and whispering a prayer. "God protect me," she murmured, exhaling with the last syllable. "I should have …" And then she was silent, motionless. She slid down the wall sideways until her head hit the deck.

Isaac felt a wave of sadness roll over him then, guilt that he hadn't been able to help her. If only he'd arrived a couple of minutes earlier, he might have been able to administer a medical canister, to stabiliser her at the very least. But he'd failed in even that respect. And because she was now dead, Isaac had no one, again, to answer his questions. He wanted to know if there were other survivors. The knowledge that this woman had survived this long rekindled hope in Isaac that there were other crewmembers out there that had as well.

Perhaps even Nicole?

He looked over to his right, through the open archway into the departure waiting area. Most of the seats there were covered in corpses that had stained the linen they were wrapped in with blood. More corpses had been lined up much the same on the floor. Isaac breathed a sigh of despair, and then scooped up the device the medical officer had proffered before standing up straight once more.

He didn't know what it was. Some parts of it looked like they directly interfaced with the stasis module he'd already slotted into place. But the device as a whole didn't look like any stasis unit that Isaac had ever worked with, and he'd worked with a few. So instead, he checked to make sure that the area was, for the moment, safe, then he flicked on his RIG's analysis module and held the device for a moment over the scanner set into the wrist plate on his right arm.

It took a moment, but when the holo flickered to view with a detailed analysis of the device, and a schematic, Isaac found himself smiling, despite the situation. He went over the analysis three times to be sure before he flicked the holo off. He turned the kinesis module over in his hand a few times, trying to determine on his own where the right connection points were. When he found them, he effortlessly plugged it into the matching slots on the already present stasis module. The whole device thrummed with life, and the indicator on the topside of the new module blinked green.

He went over it all again to be sure that it was connected properly. He found that the new device's installation apparently had no effect on the stasis module. The indicators on that were still showing up green, and the energy display indicator was still registering the same amount of reserve as before, and was unobscured.

Isaac brought up the RIG's analysis of the kinesis module again and then keyed in a more detailed description of how the device worked. A small diagram appeared above a slew of text and started to animate for his benefit. He ignored it completely as he skimmed the text below it. It had a comprehensive description on what the device would do, and how he could trigger its effect. Isaac was glad to see, tacked to the bottom of the description that the kinesis module worked off his RIG's internal power rather than the stored energy of the stasis module it was attached to.

Closing the holo again, he gently tapped the only control on the kinesis module, and then extended his hand, palm out, to the shelves that were blocking the doorway in front of him. He keyed the control again and his arm jerked only slightly as the projector in his palm slip exerted an anti-gravity field out toward the shelves.

"This … could be useful," he muttered to himself as he carelessly deposited the stack against the wall, where it wouldn't hinder him. He went back to the dead medical officer and picked up the plasma cutter from the floor before returning to the now mostly-cleared doorway and stepping through it into the corridor.

The hall between the tram platform and door at the other end—indicated by the overhead LED as _Security Station_—wasn't long. But there was a steady trail of half-congealed blood the entire length of it. Several bloodstained-linen-wrapped corpses littered the hallway, as if they'd been dumped and forgotten long ago. Isaac ignored them as best he could, ever grateful on how effective his suit's filtration system was at keeping the smell of decay from making him puke.

He keyed the release when he reached the door at the end of the hall, and it slid up into the ceiling to admit him.

When he stepped through, his RIG scratched out the usual static of someone trying to contact him. He froze instantly and scanned the room he'd just walked into before he answered it by opening his vid link.

"_Isaac, are you there?_" Hammond's voice came through before the holo cleared up enough interference for Isaac to see the accompanying face. He felt the beginnings of a smile creep up on his face, until he remembered that Hammond wouldn't see it past the helmet. He was, however, glad to see that Hammond had survived. He couldn't see Daniels behind him, though, and wondered if she hadn't.

"I'm here." Isaac looked around again carefully, creeping into the room and freezing in fright at the sound of the door shutting behind him. "What happened? Are you OK? Did you and Miss Daniels get away from that thing safely?" Those were only a few of his questions.

"_We were attacked!_" Hammond said almost breathlessly. "_Kendra's gone! One minute she was there, then … I can't believe I lost her._"

Isaac sighed ruefully, and his shoulders fell with the weight of the news. They were now, possibly—it wasn't confirmed yet that she was dead—down to two … from five.

Things hadn't gone in their favour much at all since they'd shocked into the system. So much had gone wrong. At first it had just been a matter of miscalculation; approaching the _Ishimura_ at an angle insufficient enough to avoid major debris from the planet crack. Damaged, they'd crashed into the flight deck and lost their ship. Then in the flight lounge, ship quarantine measures had been tripped and they'd encountered the alien things that had proceeded to tear first into Johnston and then Chen like they were nothing more than a flimsy ration pack. Those things had been on the prowl since, it seemed, for Isaac, Hammond and Daniels. He'd always doubted that they'd give up unless they were sure the last people left standing were dead.

But what did that say about the _Ishimura_'s crew? Did that mean that they were all dead as well? Dead like the blind medical technician from the tram platform he'd just left behind, and her friend McCoy? Dead like Captain Mathius, whose death was still a mystery to them? Or were they dead like Johnston and Chen … every last one of them torn to pieces by the aliens until there was nothing more than pooled blood and broken bodies? Did that extend to Nicole?

Isaac's thoughts went back to the recording, stored away in his RIG's memory. He itched to replay it, but resisted the urge. She'd seemed so sad, and he'd found himself wondering why. She'd also seemed scared. Now, having encountered the horrors on the ship for himself, he could only imagine the terror she'd been in.

No, more than that—he _knew_ the terror. Even armed as he was, every time he encountered those things he felt the stab of fear through his chest. His guts knotted up, and his mind just ceased to think rationally. Fighting back had just been instinct. Pure, unadulterated, human instinct. But what would it have been for poor, sweet Nicole, who more likely than not, would not have been armed, and whose first instinct was to cower, and to heal, rather than to fight and to hurt?

"So—" Isaac swallowed down the lump in his throat that stopped his reply dead, and then tried again. "So, where does that leave us? Do we just _give up_?" he demanded angrily.

Hammond hesitated and looked around for a moment. "_No. We can still do this. Get me the Captain's RIG codes and we'll find Nicole. From the security feeds, it looks like the crew barricaded the door to the emergency wing._"

"Yeah," Isaac said ruefully. He didn't have to scan left too far to see the hulking, makeshift barricade.

It looked to have been made from steel plates and support girders torn from other places of the ship and welded together in place. The entire structure was ugly, and left no room for the creatures to squeeze past. There was a narrow gap at around chest height, where Isaac could just almost imagine security officers hiding behind and using that gap as a fire point.

"_You'll have to blow through it to get to the Morgue, then,_" Hammond said bitterly. "_Which is going to waste more time. Get some Thermite from Medical Storage, and a shock pad from Zero-G Therapy. Should be down the corridor …_"

A burst of static cut into the communications, slicing across whatever Hammond was going to say. When he reappeared, he was scowling. "_God! Communication is useless in all this static!_"

Another burst of static cut through and Hammond disappeared again. Isaac waited, waited for him to reappear. After a couple of minutes, he reached to shut off the holo, but then stopped when the static disappeared and was replaced with a schematic layout of the section he was in with several points, including the barricade near him, marked with pulsing red rings.

"_This should give you an idea of where to look. I'll be … when I can … God damned static …_" Grunting in frustration, Isaac shut off the audio link and concentrated on the holo.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

* * *

><p>"<em>I finally convinced Jurgens to show me the video feed from the colony. And what I saw was <em>glorious_! Breathtaking! Miners undergoing a transformation into something extraordinary. I must know more. Even as the believer in me wants to become one of them, the scientist needs to uncover their secrets. I need to study one of these … Necromorphs, as Kyne so clinically puts it. I need to witness this infection first hand. Perhaps that patient from the colony …"_

_ - Challus Mercer, Science Officer; _USG Ishimura

* * *

><p>Isaac chose to visit Medical Storage first. When he thought about it, he considered that Zero-G Therapy might be the shorter distance to cover, but with that taken into account, he wondered why he shouldn't take out the longest path first to get it out of the way.<p>

So, after grabbing a couple of extra plasma cutter charge packs from the storage locker in the security checkpoint, Isaac walked through the large door labelled _Medical Wing_. Instantly, his revulsion shot up several levels. An uncovered, rotting corpse lay at his feet almost immediately beyond the doors. Blood was pooled around the corpse, but it had congealed and dried long ago. There wasn't enough of a uniform present beyond the blood and gore to identify which section of the crew the man belonged to.

Steeling his resolve, Isaac continued past the mangled crewmember and down the sloping hall to its bottom. Another two corpses were there, mangled again and covered in dried pools of blood. One of them, from what little uniform Isaac could see, was a medical technician. Another was an engineer in a dull green-grey jumpsuit.

It made Isaac wonder.

Why were there so many bodies here? He'd seen but a few corpses in the flight deck and tram control areas. And those had been scattered, random, distant. So why was it that so far, he'd come across so many here in the medical area?

It made sense from one point of view, he guessed as he rounded a double corner in the hall and passed three more wrapped corpses against the walls. The medical wards were the most logical places to find so much death and decay. Patients from attacks by these strange creatures would have come straight here for treatment. Corpses would have been brought here for analysis and dissection. But most of these bodies so far were in the halls. There had been near a dozen on the tram platform, not counting the blindfolded woman and her friend, McCoy, and another couple in the hall leading the security station. Thinking back on it, Isaac even remembered the stench of death in the security station itself. There'd been no whole bodies in there that he'd seen, though—only shredded pieces of wholes.

And yet, it made more sense to Isaac that, once the threat had been identified, whatever crew had been left over at that stage would have holed up in a place that was more defensible and practical. The Bridge seemed like a good place, perhaps even Engineering. But Medical was connected to nearly every other section of the ship, even without the tram system. Attacks could have come at them from any angle. If the creatures were even able to coordinate, as Isaac hadn't seen as yet, attacks could even have come from _every_ angle.

Then Isaac thought again of Nicole. She was a senior medical technician on this ship. Would she too have been holed up here? Would Isaac find her corpse strew around the deck, mangled, covered in blood-soaked linen? Or would she have had the sense to flee? Would she have seen the dangers of staying there and gone to the safest place she could find?

A loud clanging ahead tore him from his worries, and he looked up from the blood stained deck to see that the door ahead of him was malfunctioning. He swore. Though it wasn't as bad as the last one he'd come across, this new door still opened and shut at speeds too fast for any man to merely step through. The saving grace for Isaac was that there appeared to be a pattern.

Open shut. One, two, three. Open shut. One, two, three. He forced himself to commit the pattern to memory. He wasn't stupid enough to try and jump through. Not without help. But it would help him in using his stasis module.

He hit it dead on and raced through when it was open, keying in the second door's release and stepping through without a pause.

He was in a lab of sorts. Or was it medical office space? Ahead of him was a table that came up to his waist. Atop it were some empty vials, some scribbled notes on what looked like real paper, and a plastic model of the major organs of the human body. Each plastic body part was colour coded for easy recognition for someone like, say, Isaac. The brain was missing, he noted casually.

Behind it was a lit panel board, a couple of X-ray charts pinned to it at the top. Isaac knew without a doubt that the subject of those X-rays wasn't human. He didn't know much biology but there was no mistaking that the charts were just wrong. Most of the major organs were missing or had shifted to other parts of the body. Its girth was twice that of acceptable standards for most CEC crew, and its arms were long and curved, ending in bladed spikes similar to the standing creatures he'd seen numerous times before. He hadn't seen this creature before, and he shuddered to think that he might.

A storage unit against the wall was unlocked, and Isaac opened it, hoping to find something he could use inside. It was empty, so he turned away from it, scanning the room with a cautious frown.

Several desks on the level he was on had been thrown around haphazardly. Waste bins had been tipped, their contents spilling out over the floor. Broken glass and panelling littered the floor amongst the paper and card of hard copy reports and analyses. Isaac even spotted a data chip near the edge of the platform, just inside the safety rails. There was no blood on the floor, no gore, no corpses. Whatever had torn this room apart had either been human, or it had been chasing humans and caught up to them somewhere else.

Still, Isaac was careful as he approached the locked door across from the one he'd come in through. He checked to make sure that his plasma cutter was charged. Just as he was within arm's reach of the door, however, a series of loud clangs alerted him to danger.

He whirled around quickly, checking the area around him for any sign of what it was. But all he saw were vents being sealed up by emergency shutters. The door he had come through was lit in red, rather than blue; locked. He raced to it anyway and hammered down on the holo panel projector, trying to get the holo back. His efforts were in vain, and he swore and kicked the door hard.

He spun again at the sound of a horrid screech. Emergency shutters were still clanging shut over vents around the level he was on. He heard duller clangs as vents in the offices below also closed off. The lights flickered and went off, and the darkness was lit only by strobing yellow lights.

"_Hazardous anomaly detected._" The drone of the ship's onboard computer was almost drowned out by the wail of quarantine alerts sounding in time to the strobing of the emergency lights. "_Quarantine activated._"

"Oh, that's just fucking great!"

Isaac raised the cutter just as the nearest vent exploded outward and a blood-and-flesh covered alien thing flung itself through the opening. It landed with a wet thud on the deck, straightened, and turned slowly toward Isaac. Without thinking, he squeezed the trigger on the cutter and blasted the head off the thing, following through with two shots at the chest that took off the entire section around the thing's lest shoulder. He finished with another shot at the leg on the same side and watched it drop heavily to the deck.

A howl alerted him to a nearby threat. He turned a little to the left to see another one racing—literally racing—across the deck at him. Continuing to act on instinct, Isaac blasted away at it. He watched with no small amount of satisfaction as the first blast hit the thing's gut and caused it to double over, in pain or reflex he didn't know. The shot also reversed the creature's course, and it reacted as though it had been hit with a battering ram. It howled in fury as its arched back hit the deck, but Isaac didn't give it time to get back up. He aimed a couple of well-placed shots to cut off its arms and one of its legs, and then swung around to look for more.

Though he could see no more of the creatures on the upper landing, which wrapped around the edge of the vast room, he could hear the unmistakable howls and screeches of more of them nearby. There was no point in denying to himself that he knew they were on the main floor, waiting for him. Just as there was no point in denying that he had to go down there. The only doors up here were both locked—and one of them led back the way he'd come. On top of that, past hours had proven that lockdowns such as the one that had trapped him could only be lifted when the creatures in the area were either dead or gone. If he wanted to access _any_ room beyond this point, he knew he was going to have to eliminate whatever threats waited for him on the lower level.

Sighing to himself, Isaac trudged along the walkway around the far side of the room and followed it to the riser on the other side to where he'd entered. He stepped onto the riser hesitantly, cautious of malfunctions. Then, rather than hit the control holo which was, somehow, still active, he looked over the rail down to the lower level. Most of the area was obscured from his view presently by the offices to the left and right, as well as work benches and support pillars in the central area.

But one of the creatures was in sight, though Isaac wasn't sure if it was even aware of his presence. It just stood there, its arm spikes raised passively, its chest heaving with each shallow, rasping breath. It looked across the space in Isaac's direction blankly, as if it didn't even see him at all. He didn't bother wondering about it before he unloaded a few well placed plasma shots to take it out. It went down after the first one; the following three were just for added measure.

Sure that it wasn't going to get back to its feet, and that no others would come running to its rescue, Isaac keyed the descent control on the holo and waited patiently as the riser lowered him to the bottom floor. When it stopped, he stepped off it. The door immediately to his right was locked, ringed in red like the ones upstairs and sealed off with emergency plating. The one straight ahead, across the main space dominated by desks and pillars, was unlocked; one of the windows smashed, its shards littering the floor outside the office.

He proceeded forward slowly, ever aware that as yet, the lockdown had not lifted. He knew that that meant there were more of those things around. He came around in front of the office that had been to his left. The door there was unlocked too, and he opened it and went inside.

The office wasn't in as much of a mess. The table was still upright and the lamp atop it still standing. It cast a dim light over the table in the darkness, showing the strewn papers and report chips. There were more papers and chips on the floor, and they crunched under Isaac's heavy boots as he walked around. The vent was closed off. The shelving unit behind the desk and chair was bare. Two of the four storage lockers against the wall the desk faced were unlocked. One was open already and empty.

Isaac opened the other one. There was a small med pack inside, and he grabbed it without hesitating. Aside from the pack, there was nothing else. He clipped the pack to a slot on his belt, and then closed the locker again.

When he was certain that there were no creatures hiding in the office, Isaac went back to the door and keyed the release.

He almost screamed in shock. One of those things was on the ground just outside the door, and it was very much alive. It wasn't one of the ones with the tail, however. Its arms were still long, bony blades that promised death, but everything below the torso was missing. There was tearing at that area that made it look like it had been shorn away previously. Isaac aimed a heavy kick to its head and backpedalled to get a better aim at it.

It screeched at him then, its dark eyes boring into him and its jaw hanging loose. Isaac fired once, twice, and the thing collapsed to the ground, losing the support of the bladed arms that had held it up. He approached it, lifted his foot, and then brought it down hard on the thing's head. The skull cracked and splintered under the pressure, and then the entire head just collapsed under the weight, imploding into a squishy mass of blood and flesh and brains.

Isaac fought the gag reflex that hit him and looked up to see another standing bladed creature approaching him from the hall. He took it out with the last shots of his plasma cutter and then ejected the charge pack to insert another.

All went silent then, and he stood perfectly still, waiting. The lights flickered on, and the emergency lights went dark at the same moment. "_Quarantine lifted_," the computer droned.

Isaac sighed in relief. He wasn't completely out of the woods yet; he knew that. But at least now, the immediate threat had been dealt with.

He navigated the mess in the centre of the floor and entered the other office. It was in similar condition to the first: upright desk and chair, papers and report chips strewn about haphazardly, desk lamp busted but still more or less upright. The nearby shelves had a couple of plasma charges on them and he grabbed them without a thought, slipping them into his belt for further use. There was another med pack, but he ignored it for now—he already had one. After finding nothing else of use in the room, he left it and went back towards the riser.

The door near it was now unlocked, the security grill that had blocked it off had lifted. Isaac took advantage of that and went inside. Another desk and chair in that room, with more charts of the overweight-looking alien thing and a few charts of others he had seen so far. Six lockers near the second door, three unlocked, opened, empty.

He went past them and through the other door into a short corridor. He rounded the bend in the corridor and found himself in a longer extension of it. There were windows at the other end, and through them he could see the pale green glow of growth tanks. He approached slowly at first, until he saw movement through the glass. Then he picked up his speed. There was someone in there!

A man in a medical-science uniform rushed over to the window when he spotted Isaac and banged on the glass. "Come on! Come on!" he shouted through the glass. It wasn't soundproof. Isaac could hear him clearly.

Something small skittered around on the floor behind him, and that only served to ratchet the man's panic some more. "Let me out!"

Isaac heard a spitting sound and something small and sharp punched through the man's left hand, pinning it to the glass. He screamed in pain, and Isaac, on instinct, took a step backwards.

And that's when he saw it rise up. It was small, no bigger than a child. But its skin was a sickly green-yellow, veined and distorted. Its eyes were black orbs in sunken pits. Small proboscis-like tentacles shot out around its head like a mane, and three longer, barb-tipped tentacles extended from a raw and fleshy opening on its back. Those tentacles waved around in the air, the barbs ever pointed in the medical man's direction as the creature's jaw opened wide and it howled into the air in triumph. Isaac swore.

The tentacles flicked forward as one, and their tips thudded into the small of the man's back. He cried out again in pain and jerked at the strike. But he was still alive, still whimpering, still trying to pry his hand free of the barb that had it pinned to the glass.

The creature behind him turned away and jumped up to cling to the wall. He climbed about a meter and circled around, craning its neck around to look at the man it had just struck. Its tentacles came around again to strike. All three flicked forward again as one, and the barbs from their tips were spat out. They all impacted the man's head with enough force that it exploded, showering the glass with blood, brains and bits of flesh.

"Fuck!" Isaac hissed. The creature dropped to the ground and skittered out of sight.

He rushed around the double bend in the hall to the door. It didn't take too much time to key the release, and he rushed through to kneel beside the man's body. Blood was pooling around him now, and his arm had come off at the shoulder; the hand was still pinned to the glass as the rest of the body slumped with enough force to tear free.

Now he had proof that there were survivors on board; and not just survivors like the guy he'd seen killed by a bladed monstrosity moments after picking up the plasma cutter, or the woman at the tram station that had died shortly after he'd come across her. This man … this man had been in good health, aside from the panic, and the fact that he'd been killed. Isaac wished he'd gotten to the door quicker. He might have saved the man's life. And even a medical-science officer for company was better than no company at all.

Movement behind him and a horrid wail made Isaac spin around. A great mass of flesh and tentacles was flying through the air at him. He threw up his hands on instinct to catch it, holding it at arm's length so that it wouldn't try to chew at his faceplate. The plasma cutter clattered to the floor when he released his grip on it. The large tentacles on the small thing's back flailed at him, lashing out and over his shoulder. He heard wrenching metal, and then something tore through the flesh at his right shoulder. He cried out in pain and shook the thing in his hands until the barb withdrew slid free from him.

Then, before it could impale him again, he threw the wretched thing straight down at the floor at his feet. He swung his leg back, and then flung it forward with as much speed and strength as he could muster. His booted foot made contact with a squishing sound, and the force of the impact sent the creature flying across the room until it crashed head-first into a wall. There was a crunch as vertebrae shattered under the force of the impact, and the tentacles went limp as it oozed down the wall to the floor, tracking blood along the way.

Isaac bent over and reached for his plasma cutter, but a surge of pain from the wound behind his shoulder caused him to withdraw that arm and reach out instead with the other. He hissed as the pain stabbed into his brain, teeth clenched to stop himself from screaming. It burned, as if it was on fire, as if it were acid.

When he had his plasma cutter in hand, he switched it to his right, and then reached around his waist with his left for the recently acquired med pack. He found it, placed the canister in the crook of his right arm to hold it, and then reached for the med pack delivery cap on his RIG. He pressed down on it and it popped open at once. Then he popped the lid on the med canister and plugged it into the open slot. He felt the gel oozing from the canister into the auto-delivery system, and then felt the gel being applied through his suit to the wound at his shoulder.

He sighed as the burning subsided, faded, and then dropped the empty canister and closed up the delivery cap.

When the pain was fully gone, he pulled up a diagnostic on the holo. There was a hole in the armour of his suit, just as he'd expected. He knew he was going to have to find a repair bench to fix it. It wouldn't take long to do, and it wasn't the utmost priority right now, but it would have to be seen to eventually.

He took the time to look around the room as feeling and mobility returned to his arm. Power was out to a lot of the artificial growth pods, and those that were still active appeared to have locked their inhabitants into a stasis cycle to prevent degeneration while at the same time halting the growth procedure. A couple of the pods had cracked open, their liquid contents sheeting the floor while there was no sign of the subjects they'd housed.

There was a riser in the corner, and he took it up to the upper landing. The pods there were all deactivated or malfunctioning, their inhabitants already showing early signs of necrosis and decay. The smell was palpable. The glass doors on the equipment cabinet were shattered and littered the floor. The shards crunched loudly under Isaac's feet as he proceeded across the landing to the unlocked door on the other side.

When he went through the second door, he found himself in another office. There was a locked door across the room from him, and the one window was only half-shuttered. Looking through the exposed glass, he saw that he was back in the main lab area, where the lockdown had occurred—top level. Glancing back to the other door, he realised that it was the one he couldn't get through when he'd been here last. He frowned at the prospect of doubling back and going the long way just to get back to the security station.

On the solitary desk in the office was a large red canister with steel braces and a large, obvious hazard label. The script above the hazard label read as _Thermite_. Smiling, he picked it up and examined it for leaks. There didn't appear to be any, so he released a clamp on the lower-back plating of his RIG and slotted the Thermite canister there for safe keeping. The clamp closed over the canister, securing it in place.

He switched on his audio comm. and tied it in to Hammond's RIG frequency. "Hammond, I've got the Thermite."

"_Alright, that Thermite should be able to melt through the barricade back in the security station,_" Hammond's voice came over the speaker. "_But you'll still need a shock pad to ignite it. I'm unlocking the door for you to make things easier._

"_God; I hope I can hold this position. I can hear something big moving out there._" The channel cut off with a burst of static, and Isaac looked over to see that the locked door was … no longer locked.

"Thank you, Hammond," Isaac whispered to himself.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

* * *

><p><em>Medical Log<em>

_Dr. Warwick, B. (Chief Psych Officer)_

_Report of Psychiatric Observation_

_Patient: Harris, B. (Employee #PM-19026-EH) Harris is asleep, after another strong sedative. He seems literally unable to sleep without chemical aid. Most people succumb to exhaustion after 50+ hours of waking, regardless of any desire to stay awake. Not Harris._

_ His explanation of events on the colony is also odd, and points to the same paranoia we've seen elsewhere planetside. His guilt is not in doubt—two planetside security officers were present when he took Dr. Sciarello hostage and murdered Nurse Evans—and he doesn't deny his actions. But he insists that there was no crime, nor does he feel guilt._

_ This is classic sociopathic behaviour, but Harris exhibits no other symptoms. He is affable and friendly, able to empathise and offer original opinions. When questioned about the murder, however, he becomes withdrawn and intransigent, displaying schizophrenic behaviour. He also undergoes intermittent hallucinatory periods, again similar to those experienced by other colonist. Harris claims he threatened the Doctor because he "had to stop the dreams and the faces", and that he'll kill again to "Make it whole again". What that means, I haven't determined yet. A most intriguing case._

* * *

><p>Isaac found a power node in the office before he left it. It would help him with the repairs to his suit later, assuming he could find a repair bench and the appropriate tools. The node would keep his suit's systems powered while he triggered the auto repair.<p>

But when he was done in the office, he left swiftly, without looking back. He made his way back to the security station and through the other available door there, which led to Zero-G therapy. As he made his way through the corridors, he only came across one thing that surprised him.

He wasn't sure if it was a survivor, or one of those creatures, so he'd stood back to watch it for a few seconds as it rocked back and forth on its feet, smashing its face against the bulkhead in front of it over and over. After it had caved the side of its head in with a final, hard bash, it slumped to the ground, lifeless.

Isaac walked by slowly, keeping his eye on the corpse in case it decided to jump up and attack him. It didn't.

He entered through the door at the end of the hall to find himself once more in a vast room. The room was two decks high. There was a door immediately to his left—locked, of course. There was a chip on the floor, but he ignored it. Tucked into the corner by the ramp was a repair bench and a ZG therapy capsule was blocking the ramp to the other side of the chamber. Atop it was a squarish platform with no safety rails.

Then he stopped by the repair bench. He flicked it on, and waited for the side benches to fold out, increasing the bench space by double. A couple of tool arms extended from the bench and latched themselves onto the front of his RIG, obviously sensing damage. He allowed it, and then pulled the power node from his belt and plugged it into a slot on the bench. He watched as it went to work; extra tool and repair arms extended from the top of the bench and reached over his shoulders to repair any major or minor damage to the suit.

The process lasted no more than a couple of minutes; but it was a couple of minutes in which Isaac's panic level shot right up, due to the fact that he knew that he was vulnerable while attached to the bench the way he'd been. When it was over, the arms retracted back into the bench, it sealed up, switched itself off and went silent. Isaac spun around, raising his plasma cutter, which had been seen to by the bench as well, and scanned the area. Nothing had snuck up on him, this time, but he made a promise to himself that he wouldn't put himself in that position again unless he'd either completely cleared out the area, or had someone with him to watch his back.

Isaac's anxiety began to wane, and he moved over to the ramp and used his kinesis module to shift the Zero-G capsule as far to the left as he could, until the platform atop it slotted into the gap in the upper platform. He crossed the ramps swiftly to the other side of the room. Another riser was in the corner against the unlocked office. The office held no appeal for him, so he skipped it and went straight for the riser.

When he was on the top level, he proceeded to cross the platform he'd moved into place. Safe on the other side, he rounded a divider and moved the platform over a little further so that he could walk across it again, then proceeded down the corridor to the end. Light panels in the walls lit the corridor for him enough that he didn't need to switch on his RIG's beamers.

The door was locked. However, the control panel beside it had been pried loose; the covering had been dumped on the floor and the wires and conduits had been exposed. They glowed dimly with the energy coursing through them, but Isaac blasted them without a second's hesitation. The door slid open to admit him.

The hall beyond split off at the end. Directly in front of Isaac was another door, unlocked, ready to be opened for him. But the hall continued to the right to another door. That door was ringed in red, locked securely. Isaac didn't have time to try and bypass the lock himself, and with all the intermittent comm. interference they'd been experiencing so far, he didn't want to waste time asking Hammond to do it for him. So instead, he to the unlocked door and keyed the release.

The door was barely a few centimetres opened when he heard and felt it. Air rushed by him hard and fast, sucked through the gap in the door as it got wider and wider. He barely heard the sound of the computer announcing the vacuum beyond over the sound of the wind, and he dashed through the door and keyed the closing mechanism quickly to preserve the atmosphere in the diagnostics bay.

The corridor was darkened, but not unlit. Isaac took a moment to steady himself and to check the status of his suit's pressure and the magnetism of his boots. Pressure was good, but he had no reserve oxygen—there was nowhere in the suit for it. If he could hold his breath for as long as it took him to get to the nearest pressurised area, he might stand a chance. His boots' magnetic grips were stable, and working just fine.

Sucking the last gulp of oxygen from inside his suit, Isaac ran. He rounded the corner ahead of the door quickly, dashed through a series of interconnected offices when he found the main corridor was blocked by the collapsed ceiling. He dashed through another door at the other end of the corridor, pushing his way through the pressurised air that vented into the vacuum, and closed the door behind him quickly. He didn't breathe again until he heard the sound of oxygen and pressure vents restoring the right atmosphere into the hall he was now in. Only then, did he take large, greedy gulps of air to satisfy his burning lungs.

The section Isaac was in was close enough to the edge of the ship, he figured, that it had been exposed to harsh vacuum when something—likely a chunk of stray rock from the planet crack—had ripped a hole right through the layers of hull. He knew that the ship's hazard shields would have been up during a planet crack operation; it was standard procedure. The fact that something had gotten through those shields pointed to the likely scenario that the shields had been down, and that meant that power had been either completely out at the time, or diverted away.

On his knees on the deck, Isaac heaved great, hacking coughs as oxygen rushed back to fill his lungs. They hurt a little from the exposure to the vacuum, but there wasn't exactly much he could do about that. He had plenty of it in here, as long as he didn't reopen that door.

He went down the slanted hall to the large, round blast door at the end. It opened at his command without a fuss, admitting him to a massive spherical room. The whole structure was lined with gravity panels, and there was a generator to the left and right, capping the poles. A holo control panel was just to Isaac's left, attached to a support brace from the platform he stood on. He activated the zero gravity field and waited as it spooled up. Panels began to flash in sequence, slowly, and the generators on each end of the chamber thrummed with energy.

Isaac instantly felt the difference. With the gravity off, the suit felt weightless on his body. He stood up a little straighter and stretched his arms and legs to work out the weight-granted kinks that had been gathering in his joints.

He took a couple of steps forward until he was standing on the downward curve between the door and the wall below it. The magnetism of his boots kept him to the deck plating, but he was now walking on a wall, and at first it was a little disorienting. He soon got over that. It was exactly the angle he wanted. He brought up his RIG control holo and switched off the magnetism of his boots. Then he pushed off from the deck firmly.

Drifting across the zero-gravity field was a great feeling, but the experience was sobered by the fact that there were two bodies floating in the field with him. There were some crates as well, and a large power cell, but they didn't bother him so much. He drifted by them all, forcing himself not to look at the mutilated faces of the corpses, forcing down the gag reflex once more when he passed far too close to one.

When he reached the other side of the chamber, he stopped himself with his hands against the curved deck plates. Then, shifting as best he could in the weightlessness, he brought his feet around to the deck and reactivated the magnetic soles. He felt his feet clamp down on the deck, straightened up, and breathed a sigh. That part had been easy. It took little effort to take the few steps that put him upright once more and he examined the door to find that it was locked—one of the power cells had been yanked free.

He wondered about that. What reason could any crew in this section have to yank free a power cell for a door? It wasn't as if the creatures used doors in the first place; they got into rooms and hallways through the vents, which were seemingly everywhere. But he didn't worry about it too long.

He turned to his right and saw a power cell drifting very slowly away from him. He activated the kinesis unit, reached out, and pulled the power cell towards him. Then he grabbed it with both hands, deactivating the kinesis unit in the same swift stroke. He turned it over in his hands once to make sure that he wasn't holding the end that would plug into the socket, and then he lined it up and slammed it in with little grace. It was tough; they were built that way. He knew he wouldn't damage it.

The connections fused together, linking the power from the cell to the door. Something beneath the wall plating hummed with life, and the red ring around the door changed to blue. Isaac keyed the release and stepped inside.

The room inside was small, almost claustrophobic. Shelves lined most of space against the walls. A couple of small, locked storage units lay tucked into the corner to his right. A pair of upright lockers was against the wall immediately to his left. One was locked, the other wasn't. He opened it and found another small med pack. Guessing he might need it later, he plucked it from the shelf and clipped it to a spare slot at his belt before he slammed the locker shut with a reverberating _clang_.

A work table stood against the wall adjacent to the lockers. Benches on either side were piled high with scribbled reports, a data reader and data chips. There was no testing equipment, no instruments. The table had upon it a single thing. Its main body was round and flat, and there were three, thick appendages equidistant around its circumference. Each of those appendages had a series of controls and toggles and indicator lights. The flat top of the centrepiece had a few grooves and slots, but to what it fitted into, Isaac had no idea.

He placed his plasma cutter on the bench to the side and picked up the shock pad. The appendages had hinges with locking pins in place, and he carefully folded them into and against the underside of the centrepiece. Then, he reached behind him with the device and sought out another vacant clamp to hold it in place.

When it was secure, Isaac picked the cutter back up from the tabletop and checked its charge, then he opened a channel to Hammond.

"Hammond," he started, "I've got the shock pad. I'm returning to the security station now."

"_That's great, Isaac,_" Hammond's voice returned calmly. He mustn't be in any imminent danger if he could sound so … not relaxed exactly, but less pressured. "_Combine that with the Thermite at the barricade to destroy it. I'm guessing you have an idea how you're going to do that?_"

"You bet I do," Isaac replied as he stepped in front of the door, ready to leave. "I'll get back to your when I find Captain Mathius."

"_OK." _There was a pause, then;_ "Shit! I can hear more coming; moving through the vents. Stay safe, Isaac!_" The comm. went dead.

Isaac hated this. If not for the fact that he still hadn't found Nicole, or any evidence that he _wasn't_ going to find her, he would have just found a shuttle and gotten off the _Ishimura_. It wasn't such an unbelievable thing for him to admit that he was scared out of his mind. These creatures seemed to be everywhere. What little surviving crew he'd encountered so far hadn't lived long. It was like they were living long enough to be found, and then … not so living.

First it was the crewmember behind the door when Isaac had grabbed the cutter several decks below the flight lounge. He'd begged, he'd screamed, he'd cried until Isaac had finally gotten the door open, and the a split second after it had swung open, one of those bladed-arm things had torn him apart before Isaac had reacted and killed it. Then there was the woman at the tram station, who'd survived long enough to give him the kinesis module, claiming she'd known he was coming. Then she too had died. Then Isaac had seen it again in the growth lab. A medical technician, panicked, sure, but uninjured and seemingly healthy. He'd been killed by something that looked like a horribly mutated infant, right before Isaac's eyes.

He'd had no chance to ask any of them if they'd known Nicole, or even if they knew if she'd survived somewhere on board. Would he ever get that chance if he came across another survivor? He hoped so. He needed to know.

He opened the door to the zero-gravity chamber and then dropped flat to his stomach as something dark and horribly veined flew at him.

He turned over onto his back and looked behind to see that it was another of those long tailed things. Quickly, while it was recovering, he shoved himself to his feet and dashed out of the room. The door slid to a close behind him, the lock clicked, and Isaac tore at the nearest power cell until he felt the snapping and wrenching he knew meant it was coming free.

Unfortunately, he'd had nothing to brace himself against, and he went over the edge, losing his footing. That was OK though. He thrust the power cell away from him, took a shot at it until it darkened, became useless. Then he looked around to make sure that there were no more of those things around. It appeared as though they weren't, and he shifted his body around best he could and flailed until his course changed and he found himself propelled towards the platform with the holo panel attached.

He left the chamber without looking back.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

* * *

><p>"<em>You found something down there, didn't you?"<em>

_ "Yes … we found something."_

_ "So, the texts were right all this time."_

_ "I wouldn't be certain about that. There was nothing divine in what I saw."_

_ "We must embrace this. We are the first witnesses!"_

_ "Mathius isn't letting anyone down on the colony. It's under quarantine until we learn more."_

_ "To hell with Mathius! He, of all people, should know that this is greater than him, or the operation, or the company. This is our deliverance!"_

_ "Keep your damn voice down! People are dying down there."_

_ "Only the worthless and the unbelievers. But I believe. Do you believe, Terrance? Do you?"_

-Challus Mercer and Terrance Kyne, Science Department; _USG Ishimura_

* * *

><p>Hammond was royally pissed off. And to top that off, he was scared. He couldn't shake the sense that he was being watched, that those aliens were out there somewhere, crawling the ship. He was safe here, in the Captain's Nest, below the Bridge. But the Bridge was likely to be crawling with them now.<p>

Who knew where Kendra Daniels was? She'd disappeared when the tailed alien had attacked them. Had one of the aliens dragged her away? Had she ran? It galled him to think of her as a coward. He wasn't particularly fond of cowards, having come from a long line of military men. But if she _had_ fled under her own power, then perhaps it was for the better. He couldn't begrudge her the instinct to survive. He just hoped that she was safe, wherever she'd gone.

Slumped as he was in Captain Mathius's comfortable, Zach Hammond gazed intently at the holo in front of him. It was a schematic of the medical section that Isaac Clarke was going through now. He'd already burned through the barricade that had been blocking off the medical wards and the morgue with the Thermite-shock pad combination.

It didn't relieve or surprise Hammond at all that it had worked. Knowledge of explosives and other heat-related weaponry was required knowledge for him. Isaac, too, had seemed to know what he was doing. Either it was basic knowledge for engineers as well, or else he'd learned it from someone else. Either way, the main obstacle was out of the way.

Most of the ship's systems were still locked out by Mathius's command codes. Clarke was going to have to get those codes if any of them hoped to get into the system and find out anything. Hammond knew he was motivated enough to do so. He had a lover on board somewhere, and Hammond had promised to locate her for the engineer once he had the codes. He had no intention of breaking that promise.

As far as he was concerned, however, the mission the CEC had sent them here to complete was over. He wasn't going to lose any more from his team to repair a ship that was, more or less, beyond their capabilities. Even if the _Ishimura_ had all the required resources and equipment on board and even if there were enough survivors on board to even both with a repair attempt, Hammond wasn't sure he'd even authorise it. His priority now was getting himself and his people out. If they came across survivors, well then they would take them back to Earth as well.

The _Ishimura_ was lost now, lost to the aliens that infested it, crawled in its air ducts, slaughtered its crew, attacked without mercy, without conscience, without intellect. Damned if Hammond was going to stay on board.

The indicator blip on the holo that represented Isaac's position stopped suddenly. He was in an office in the ship's clinic. Hammond was about to radio him and ask if there was a problem when the indicator moved out of the office once more and toward a thick corridor marked just opposite it. The indicator stopped again, obviously as Isaac waited for the doors to open, and then passed through into the corridor and slowed.

Hammond minimised the holo and shunted it to the side. He brought another screen into focus—footage from a surveillance camera just above the door Isaac had just stepped through. He could see Isaac now in the holo, proceeding down the long hallway slowly, cautiously. The way he carried himself … Hammond considered he would have made an excellent security officer or marine. He didn't need to entertain the wonder at why Isaac hadn't pursued such a career. It was obvious to anyone that knew him, even as little as Hammond did, that engineering was his true passion.

The corridor was dark, but dull white emergency light shined down from irregularly spaced panels in the ceiling. Gurneys complete with drips and monitoring equipment had been shunted into shallow slots against the wall to Isaac's left. He ignored the door ahead, and Hammond saw that it was locked, explaining why.

He minimised the security feed and picked another from the schematic—they were clearly marked.

While Hammond watched Isaac round another corner into view of the surveillance camera, he brought up his RIG's comm. diagnostic system and ran another check. The static that had been cutting him off earlier had since died away, and Hammond could find no explanation as to its cause. But he still routinely checked the comm. just in case it returned.

When it checked out clear, he tried to tie into Daniels's RIG frequency. "Miss Daniels?" he started softly. It was his fifth try at contacting her since they'd been separated and he'd fled to the Nest. "Miss Daniels; it's Hammond. Do you read?" There was no answer except for the shrill of static. "Kendra? It's Hammond. Can you hear me? Am I coming through?" And still no one replied.

He gave up, shutting down the comm. and returning to the surveillance feeds. Isaac had disappeared again. Reviewing the section map, Hammond saw that he was just outside the morgue.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

><p><em>Medical Log<em>

_Dr. Domus, G. (Medical Examiner)_

_Report of death on ship_

_Subject: Captain Mathius, B. It is my sad duty to officially pronounce Captain Benjamin Mathius dead. Reports of the exact circumstances surrounding his death are conflicted, and beyond the scope of my role. I can only report on the body._

_ The subject was in generally good health for his age, though a cursory blood test indicates his leukocyte count was very low, with eosinophils in particular almost non-existent. His pre-flight physical exam showed no such problems, indicating rapid onset; however, it is unlikely this had any effect on his death._

_ Multiple contusions on the arms and hands, indicating a brief struggle pre-mortem. Slight contusions around the ribcage, suggesting his chest was restrained in some way. Cause of death was a single prolonged trauma to the ocular body which continued on through the cavity wall, and finally into the frontal lobe, causing rapid neurotrama, seizure, and death._

_ The force required to puncture the ocular cavity in this manner is great, and the possibility of self infliction correspondingly low._

_ I therefore have no alternative but to record a preliminary finding of UNLAWFUL DEATH. Whether deliberate or accidental is beyond my jurisdiction._

* * *

><p>Isaac almost threw up the second he stepped into the morgue. If the science labs had been a mess before, it was nothing compared to the state the morgue was in.<p>

Gurneys had been tossed around carelessly. Some were lucky to still be upright. There were three corpses on the floor in varying rates of decay or mutilation. Nearly a dozen morgue locker doors were wide open, slabs extended and empty. Blood covered nearly every surface; smatterings of gore in places. There were scratches on the walls, the lockers.

The autopsy bay on the far side of the room was sealed. Glass walls allowed Isaac to see into the bay, but the door was locked, barring him entry. There was a body on the slab in the bay. The man was elderly with grey, almost white hair and beard. Age lines decorated his face, and he was dressed in the standard officer uniform of the CEC; Captain's rank insignia wrapped around the cuffs of the uniform. Something, a syringe Isaac noted when he was less than a meter from the glass, had been thrust through his left eye. Only half of the syringe was visible. Isaac shuddered.

He switched his comm. on and tied in with Hammond. "I've found Mathius." He examined the edge of the glass, looking for weakness.

"_What state is the body in?_" Hammond asked. "_How did he die?_"

"Needle to the eye, it would appear," Isaac said. He punched the glass as hard as he could; attempting to shatter it. It didn't budge. "Looks like the needle punched right through to his brain."

"_Instant death,_" Hammond muttered. "_Can you reach the body?_"

"The door to the autopsy bay is locked, and the glass looks unbreakable. I could try shooting it?"

"_Give it a go_."

Isaac took a couple of steps away from the glass. Then he turned, raised the plasma cutter, and then squeezed the trigger. The blast slammed into the window and dissipated, seeming to dissolve into the glass itself. Isaac frowned and fired three more times. By the third shot, however, all he'd managed to do was cause a small crack to appear.

"At this rate, it'll take two full charge packs to blast that thing open," he grumbled. "I've got that, but—"

Suddenly, he was cut off. There was a scrabbling sound above, moving toward the autopsy bay. He looked up, but saw nothing clinging to the ceiling. Whatever it was must have been travelling through the vents. It was probably another one of those aliens, he figured. Instantly, his defences went up, and he looked around to make sure that none had snuck into the morgue behind him.

Something dropped down behind him, and he spun again toward the autopsy bay. Something large and fleshy was in the bay with Mathius's body. Isaac rushed over to the glass to get a better look at it—it was behind the slab.

It reared up; unfurling from the ball of flesh it appeared to be. It was long. Its insides appeared to be little more than bone and some muscle. Large flaps of flesh extended from either side, looking from his view like bloody wings with something akin to hands at the ends. There were no arms or legs, and where the head and neck would have been was just an extension of the body, encasing small feelers and sacks.

The thing spun around in the air slowly, its wings beating to keep it afloat. A strange crooning issued from somewhere in the creature's midsection. It set Isaac's nerves on edge, his teeth clamped together to force down the scream that bubbled its way up his throat. Then it was facing Mathius's body, and it stopped. The crooning grew louder, and its wings beat stronger, propelling it toward the corpse.

"Get away from him!" Isaac shouted, angry.

"_Isaac? What's happening down there?_"

"One of those things is going after the Captain's body. I can't stop it!" Isaac pounded on the glass again. It turned and "looked" at him. "Get away! Shit!"

The thing turned back to Mathius. It was within reach now, and its wings enveloped the body, the hand-like appendages gripping the shoulders tight. Isaac watched as a long, sharp-tipped appendage extended from somewhere around its "head". When fully extended, it reached at least a meter, and it was crooked slightly. The proboscis jerked once, fast. The tip disappeared into the Captain's skull, buried, and still the proboscis pushed deeper.

A small section of the appendage was a little less fleshy, a little thinner it appeared, than the rest. Isaac could almost see through it. Something appeared to be pumping through the appendage and into the Captain's skull.

"Oh, _fuck_!"

"_Isaac?_" Hammond sounded on the verge of panic.

"Hammond, I think I just worked out what the fuck these things are!" he shouted, taking first one step, and then another away from the autopsy bay.

"_They're alien, aren't they?_"

"Uh, not quite. They're us. Or, well, the crew. The _Ishimura_'s crew."

"_What?_" Incredulity. "_Are you sure?_"

"Positive. That thing just pumped something into Mathius's head," Isaac replied. He bumped into something, and turned to see it was an overturned gurney.

When he looked back up at the autopsy bay, he saw that the winged creature had moved away from the body now, its stabbing appendage disappearing back into its body. Now that he'd considered it, his examination of the creatures he'd found thus far seemed a little more forthcoming. They _did_ appear humanoid. Most ran on two legs, and the long, bladed arms could very well have ended in five-fingered hands instead. The ones with the tails had human-like arms.

And the smaller creature he'd seen in the growth labs … no, he couldn't bring himself to think it. It couldn't have been.

Mathius's body jerked once on the slab, drawing Isaac's attention. He watched as the back arched and there was a loud crack of snapping bones. Another crack, and then another soon followed.

"_KYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYNE!_" The voice was guttural, barely human. But it was coming from Mathius. It was the only thing he said before he went slack again.

"_What the fuck was that?_"

"That … was Captain Mathius."

"What_?_" Hammond demanded. "_Are you saying that he's coming back to life?_"

"Think about it, sir …" Isaac could barely keep the panic out of his voice. He watched as Mathius's skin darkened, cracked, sloughed away to reveal muscle and tendon and raw flesh beneath. "If this was an alien occupation of the ship, we'd have seen a lot more bodies as the crew was slaughtered. Where are those bodies? If the crew was still alive somewhere on board, don't you think they'd have contacted us by now?"

It hurt him to say that. He didn't want Nicole to be dead. There was still a good chance she was holed up somewhere, as much alive as the scientist in the growth labs had been before that mutated thing had killed him. Perhaps she cowered somewhere the creatures weren't likely to look for her. Or perhaps she was somewhere with other survivors, armed and waiting for rescue.

"_Fuck!_" Hammond swore. "_Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!_"

A guttural groan came from the open-locked jaw of Mathius's corpse. A loud ripping followed—material, Isaac realised. The Captain's RIG was ripping down the sides. The flesh of his arms was stretching and melding into his sides. The arms themselves seemed to drain, to flush away, as they joined into the torso. A couple of small cracks, and the forearms were suddenly sticking out through the captain's stomach, withered and vein-y. The groan had morphed into something of a bubbling hiss now, as bony scythes punched through the flesh of the shoulders and extended up and out. A final two cracks sounded, and Isaac watched as those straight scythes bent forward at what would have been elbows on normal arms. The chest and abdomen caved inward slowly, as if the insides were being sucked away, leaving only the flesh and bones. All the white hair on the captain's head and face fell away from the skin, truly dead.

By now, there was nothing left of Mathius that was recognisable. The transformation ripped through the RIG as though it were nothing. It rolled sideways, falling off the bed and bracing itself against the floor with its bony scythes and its feet. Its neck, longer than Mathius's had been, craned until black orb eyes stared straight at Isaac, measuring, hungry.

It howled at him; an angry sound, it drilled straight through the suit and froze Isaac in place.

With its blades, it shoved against the bloodstained tiles and righted itself. It howled again, and then lunged forward.

"No way!" Isaac breathed in disbelief. The creature's blades drilled straight through the glass. Its body followed through with a powerful shove, and the glass gave, shattering outwards. Shards bounced against the tiles, and off Isaac's RIG.

He swung his arm up, bringing the plasma cutter to bear on the mutant's head. But he wasn't fast enough to pull back on the trigger before one of those powerful scythes slammed flat-sided against his wrist, knocking the cutter away from the firing zone. It jumped on him, pinning him painfully beneath its weight and an overturned gurney. His RIG absorbed most of the impact, but not all of it, and he hissed in pain.

Hammond was screaming in his ear over the comm. now, but Isaac ignored it. He couldn't waste time to switch off the audio, but neither could he afford to be distracted. This thing was faster than others he'd come across so far. And stronger.

The mutant-Mathius was snapping at him now, jaws coming together repeatedly only centimetres from the faceplate of Isaac's RIG. When Isaac couldn't bring the cutter back around to get off a shot, he worked with his legs instead. He wedged them up, planting his feet against whatever he could, and then pumped his legs with as much strength as he could.

It howled as it sailed through the air and slammed, full-bodied, into one of the support braces for the glass wall. But Isaac was marginally quicker. He swung his arm back around, plasma cutter in hand, and aimed a full blast at the thing's chest. It recoiled, howled, and came at him again. He blasted again and again, to no effect. It just kept coming at him.

When it reached him, Isaac planted his feet against it again, grabbed one of its scythes with his free hand. He pushed off with his feet while pulling with his arm, and used the mutant's weight and momentum against it. It sailed over his head and landed somewhere behind him with a deafening crash and a wail of pain.

Quickly, Isaac pushed up to his feet and dashed over to where the glass had shattered. He spun around to see that the mutant-Mathius's limbs were tangled up among the frames of two toppled gurneys. It screeched and wailed, flailing as it tried to pull itself free. Something shifted to Isaac's left and he swung around and blasted the limbs off another of the things. It wasn't as fast as the mutant-Mathius, and its limbs came away easily. It fell to the deck and didn't move again.

Then he remembered the flying creature.

It was there—across the morgue, across even from the mutant-Mathius. Its wings were wrapped around another exposed corpse on the floor, its hook-hands grasping at shoulders. The proboscis extended from within its body.

Determined, Isaac took aim with the cutter and blasted once. The plasma sizzled through the vulnerable appendage and it came free. The winged thing fell to the ground, thrashing and screaming in pain.

Isaac turned back to where the mutant-Mathius was and barely acknowledged the dark, looming figure in front of him before a blow to the chest sent him flying across the autopsy bay and crashing into the wall. Again, his RIG absorbed most of the impact but not all. His teeth came together to stymie a pained hiss. Pain shot up his spine from the small of his back and nestled somewhere between his shoulders.

He shook his head to dislodge the sensation and looked up to see the mutant-Mathius charging him again.

He looked around frantically; his plasma cutter wasn't in hand anymore. He spotted it a couple of meters away, and knew he wasn't going to reach it in time. He tried anyway, lurching across with arm outstretched to grasp it. His fingers brushed against the grip for less than a second before the scythe of the creature pinned him against the wall again. The blade was turned inwards, so that it was the blunted edge pressing against Isaac's chest plate. The other blade lashed out with such speed, Isaac could barely follow it. He thought he was done for, until he heard a wrenching sound as the blade punched through the wall just over his shoulder. He looked at it, and then up into the horrible face that had once been a great leader. It stared back at him. He couldn't tell if it was from interest or hunger. He didn't particularly want to find out.

Acting on instinct, he brought his arm up in a blurring movement. It connected with the elbow join of the wicked scythe that had pierced the wall. There was a loud crack, and a horrid screech of pain from deep in the mutant's throaty area. The blade pinning him to the wall lost its pressure, and Isaac shoved it away and rolled to the side.

He reached the plasma cutter before the mutant recovered. Then he was back on his feet, aiming for its good arm. He blasted it off with a precise shot just above the shoulder join. It clattered to the ground. As the creature wailed in pain, Isaac blasted off its other arm and one of its legs.

But it was still moving when it hit the deck. Though it had only the one leg and no other limbs with which to propel itself forward, it thrashed around, trying to get to him.

"Sorry, Captain," Isaac said softly before he squeezed the trigger again and again and unloaded the rest of the plasma charge pack into the mutant's head and chest. Its anguished wails were silenced, and it lay motionless on the deck in front of him.

He stood there for a few minutes, absorbing the enormity of the situation. It pressed down on him like a set of weights, threatening to overwhelm him. But it was his resolve that saved him from succumbing and crashing to his knees on the deck. But still, he just stood there.

He didn't know how much time had passed before he finally heard Hammond's voice again, concerned, worried. "_Isaac? Fuck this, I'm coming down there!_"

That tore him from his anguish, and he blinked, clearing his mind. "No," he said. "I'm fine. It's just … he was my Captain once. He might have already been dead when that thing changed him, but it doesn't change the fact that I just cut him to ribbons."

"_You said it, Isaac. It wasn't Mathius anymore. That thing you saw putting something in to his head did that._" There was a pause. Hammond was giving him time to absorb that. "_It was self defence, Isaac. You or him. You chose._"

"I guess."

"_Is the Captain's RIG still intact?_"

"More or less. The mutation all but shredded it. Give me a second."

Reluctantly, he crossed the short distance between himself and the corpse. He nudged it once, twice with his foot to make sure it was dead—from what he'd seen so far, these things reacted, rather than used intellect. If it was still alive, it would have done something. When he was sure, he knelt down beside it, laid the plasma cutter on the floor by his leg, and pulled his helmet free.

The smell assaulted Isaac instantly; rotting flesh and blood and something else that he couldn't identify. He put his left hand over his mouth and nose to filter most of the smell while running his free hand over the body. The flesh was tough, unyielding beneath his fingers. Wounds from blasts of the plasma cutter oozed thick, dark blood onto the tiled floor. It was starting to pool around Isaac's knees. He fought the urge to get up and just walk away.

His hand came away gripping to the tattered remains of the Captain's left sleeve. The RIG's controls were still attached just above the rank stripes.

"I've got Captain Mathius's RIG," Isaac said into his comm. He heard Hammond breathe a sigh of relief over the line. "I'm transmitting the codes to you now."

He found a catch on the panel and hooked it up to his own RIG. Then he initiated a data transfer straight to Hammond, wherever he was, and hoped that the right information was being sent. He didn't have time to waste trying to find it himself. He got back to his feet, picking up the plasma cutter and his helmet, and walked out of the autopsy bay.

The door he'd come through was locked now, but the one near the door into the autopsy bay—which was still locked—was now unlocked. He shook his head. It was starting to seem like a maze to him.

"_Codes received,_" Hammond said. There was a pause has he checked something, and when he spoke again, his mood sounded a little better. "_And they look good; thank God. I'll start accessing the Captain's records right now._"

"What about Nicole?" Isaac went through the door into a lift and hit the ascent control on the holo without waiting for the door behind him to close.

"_I intend to keep my word, Isaac,_" Hammond promised. He sounded a little put out that Isaac would even have hinted that he'd had no intention of doing so. "_But I need to find out what the hell happened to this ship. I'll check personnel records later and see if I can find out what happened to Nicole. Head to the tram station, and I'll contact you there with an update._"

"Right." He shut off the comm. and waited as the lift carriage shot up through the decks.

It stopped, and the doors opened to admit Isaac back to the clinic. But now, he was directly opposite of the anteroom leading back to the security station. Nothing much had changed since he'd passed through on his way to the morgue. Some of the pooled blood on the floor seemed to have expanded; the bodies from which they originated still drip, drip, dripping.

He passed through the anteroom without incident and through the winding halls back to the security station. It hadn't changed at all in his time away. At least that offered some sign that the mutants hadn't progressed here and lay in wait somewhere. After passing through the ruined barricade he'd burned through earlier, Isaac turned almost immediately to his right and keyed the door release.

Isaac's comm. trilled to indicate an incoming transmission, and he keyed the visual as he proceeded down the hall to the tram station. "_Isaac!_" Hammond was panting, almost out of breath. It made Isaac's hair stand on end and he gripped the rim of his helmet tighter.

"What's wrong Hammond?" he asked at once.

"_Somehow … one of them found a way down to the Captain's Nest!_" Shit, Isaac thought. That's where Hammond must have retreated to when he and Daniels had been attacked on the Bridge. "_I managed to contain it in a damaged escape pod. Lifting the executive lockdown._"

There was a pause. "_I found the deck logs. Whatever is happening around here, it came from the planet when they cracked it open. It spread to the colony, and reached the ship! Isaac …_" Hammond was shaking his head now, his brow creased. "_This isn't an infection. It's some form of alien life._"

"It can't be. Not with what I saw in the morgue. I saw one of those things change Captain Mathius into a monster."

"_It could be both. I don't know. I'm still looking into it. But if you saw that, then it could be part of the alien cycle. I don't know. I just don't._"

"That's pretty fucked," Isaac said irately. He stepped out through the second door and was once more on the tram platform. It took him no time to cross the deck and step into the tram. He was just about to key in the Bridge as his next destination when Hammond's expletive stopped him.

"_Shit!_" he swore. "_We've got bigger problems. The ship's engines are offline and our orbit is decaying._"

"Why?"

"_I don't know, for fuck sake!_" Hammond snapped. "_Sorry. Get over to the Engineering deck ASAP, while I stay here and figure out what the problem is._"

"On it."

So instead, Isaac keyed in Engineering and sat down on one of the seats as the door clamped shut and the tram took off.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

* * *

><p>"<em>Personal Log … Acting Chief Engineer Jacob Temple. It's been two days since they pulled the planet open … since the Captain died. The panic, the riots … they were nothing compared with what came after.<em>

"_Our friends, our co-workers started coming back … changed … coming back to kill us, drag us away. Rucker disappeared this morning, and I have to assume he's dead. My crew … they're starting to crack. I'm trying to keep an eye on them, but right now I have bigger problems._

"_We're haemorrhaging fuel, and the primary engine is labouring. Danvers and I are going to try to reach the fuel depot to see if we can fix it. Temple out."_

_-Jacob Temple, Acting Chief Engineer;_ USG Ishimura

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><p>Hammond contacted him the second he was out of the tram. It was a little distracting to have to stop and deal with that nearly every few minutes. But there was necessity behind it. They were in hostile territory with an unknown number of mutant alien creatures running around hunting them. And with what Isaac had to do now—fix the engines—it would be advantageous to have as much information about the problem as possible.<p>

"_We've got two problems,_" Hammond started, his face morphing back and forth between irritation, concern, and relief, "_and we're working on borrowed time, here._"

"Give me the heads up," Isaac said. If there was one thing the course of this mission had taught him thus far, it was how to multitask effectively. He kept an eye on the holo that had popped up with the comm. linkage, but at the same time he loaded a new charge pack into the plasma cutter and proceeded slowly across the deck to the hallway exit.

"_First; there's no fuel in the engines. Second; the gravity centrifuge_is_offline … which means that there's a couple of trillion tonnes of rock pulling us down._"

"Great," Isaac muttered, "nothing too difficult, then."

"_I need you to get that centrifuge operational—that probably goes without saying for someone of your knowledge base, though—refuel the main engine, and then fire it up so I can stabilise the ship's orbit._"

"No problem. Let me know when other developments arise." Hammond nodded, and then disappeared as he cut the link.

When the door opened, he stepped through it, finding himself in another corridor that veered off to the right at its end. He followed it through at an even pace, his eyes darting left and right, checking for threats. But there were none.

The hallway opened up into the main control room, and Isaac stopped in main chamber to look around. The control room was directly opposite of the corridor he'd come out from. Several control panels were busted, non-functional. One of the holo panels was on, but a quick check found that its systems were inaccessible. There was a body in the chair—human, but so mutilated and bloodied that whoever it had been had clearly suffered. Lockers were open and empty, diagnostic units were non-functional as well. To the left of the corridor as he'd left it was a small inlet with a lift that led to Centrifuge Control. There was a large, round blast door a few meters from the inlet which led to the engine bay proper, and the door on the right of the corridor went to the Machine Shop. Isaac knew all this without having to check the LEDs. As an engineer, these areas of the ship had been where he'd performed most of his duties during his assignment to the crew.

He decided to go to the Machine Shop first, and opened the door once he reached it without delay. The chamber he came into was dark, but not entirely without lighting. He made his way down the ramp without an issue. Weaving through the heavy machinery into an open space at the other end of the floor, he saw an unlocked door to the left. A repair bench was opposite him, and he went straight to it—he didn't know how much damage the confrontation with mutant-Mathius had caused his RIG.

The bench was already powered, and it went to work on him quickly. As it turned out, there had been a couple of ruptures in the outer shell of the RIG, and some smaller, less important systems had taken a bit of damage. The bench supplied him with a new kinesis unit, as the one he'd had had been destroyed entirely by the earlier confrontation. Med gel was inserted into the autoloader slot. When the arms retracted, Isaac stepped away and made for the door.

The floor beyond it was grilled, and not knowing what to expect of its stability, Isaac tread carefully down the short corridor to the split at the end. Loud scrabbling sounds drew his attention downwards, and he saw what looked like one of the tailed mutants climbing around underneath him quickly, using the grills as holding points as it swung like an ape.

To the right was a safety rail running along the catwalk, and a large chasm clouded in steam and fog. Isaac went left instead, down the slanted walk and then up another one at the other end. He was met with more grills and darkness.

But a shuffling seemed alive in that darkness—more than just the shadow of something that shifted under the breeze of a vent, or a cloud of smoke or steam curling up from the floor. It shifted with the ungainly squishiness of the creatures that were an infestation on the ship. Isaac reacted instinctively, bringing his plasma cutter to bear and firing off three quick bursts. The hunk of mutated, exposed soft tissue and liquefied internal organs screeched a denial and fell backwards over the railing, disappearing down below in the roiling condensation of the cooled engines. Only after a minute did he hear the soft _thud_ as the mass hit the lowest part of the great chamber.

Satisfied, he turned left again towards the controls for the transport gondola. The holo showed a schematic of the gondola. Across the schematic flashed the word _MALFUNCTION_ in red block letters.

"Fucking great," Isaac whispered to himself, looking around.

To the immediate right of him was where he would normally board the gondola. But it was several meters away from the platform, the boom gate down to stop him from accidentally stepping over the edge and plummeting to a squishy death far below. He could see in the dimly lit chamber the blood and gore covering the deck of the gondola. Someone had been butchered on it.

Isaac keyed the kinesis unit for extra power and stretched out his hand. Flexing his fingers, he extended the field of kinetic energy out to the gondola until he felt it snag. His arm suddenly felt as though he held a half-tonne of weight, but as though gravity were pulling on it laterally, rather than as it should have been. But he kept his arm up, with as much effort and assistance from his RIG as he could. He flexed his fingers again and the kinetic field began to retract, shrinking back into the palm of his glove. In response, there was a screeching sound—metal on metal—and the gondola came towards him, slowly.

It came to a clanging halt flush against the platform. The boom arm swung up and open. Isaac lowered his arm and keyed the kinesis unit into standby mode before he stepped onto the solid steel deck of the gondola. Under normal circumstances, he might even have moved the body parts off the deck onto the grill walkway. But circumstances aboard the _Ishimura_ were hardly normal. Isaac couldn't take any chances, and so he kicked the body over the edge. He didn't watch it fall, slightly disgusted with his own actions.

The holocontrols on the gondola were still functional. So he entered in the sequence to lower the boom arm once more and take him across the chasm to the other side of engineering. With a jolt, the transport started to move.

He was halfway across when he heard it: a terrible growl that echoed around the engineering chamber and seemed to come at him from all sides. Low and guttural, it reminded him of the thing that had been Captain Mathius.

"_KYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYNE!_" The reminder of Mathius's alterations came unbidden to Isaac's mind, and he shook his head to clear it of the myriad of images flashing behind his eyes. Mathius had been a great man, a great captain. To see what had become of him only heightened the level of anxiety Isaac had been feeling about this whole mission since they'd intercepted Nicole's recording in shock space.

If Mathius could be changed … no. Isaac refused to believe it. Nicole was alive somewhere. Alive and herself. There had to be no doubt in his mind or else he would lose all desire to function. He would lose all sense for the mission, and therefore he would never know for sure because he would never find her.

He knew he would.

He knew he must.

The other side was coming into view now; the steam parted ahead of the gondola as if it knew he wanted to see what lay ahead. More darkness, he saw. More darkness and moving shadows.

He raised the plasma cutter, checked its charge and slipped a fresh pack from his belt—the current charge pack only had a couple of shots left and he might need a quick reload.

Three shadows came out of the darkness on the catwalk he was approaching. All of them were emaciated vestiges of humanity. One had a jaw missing, with strands of muscle and the remnants of a tongue hanging loose in its place. Teeth were gone, either pulled out or fallen out from the change Isaac had no idea. Another's midsection was more or less gone, torn away in parts and liquefied until there was almost nothing but the spinal column there. The top of another's head had been sliced clean off by some kind of saw, and an eyeball hung loose by a thread from its socket. Spikes stuck out of the shoulders and their arms were little more than tiny protuberances from their abdomens.

All three of them stood more or less still on the platform ahead, looking across at Isaac as he approached them with looks of hunger on their repulsive faces.

Isaac didn't hesitate. He couldn't bring himself to analyse them for signs to tell him who they had once been. He didn't really want to know. It would only make it that much harder to do what he had to. Instead he fired. Two plasma charges caught the first of the creatures, one in the head and one in the chest. Its head exploded, but the body remained upright, its bladed arms slashing in the air in an angry retaliation of a prey it could no longer see—if indeed the creatures could see. The third missed and sailed over its shoulder, fizzing out against the wall meters behind it.

Quickly, Isaac ejected the charge pack and slipped in the new one. Locking it in, he squeezed the trigger again and again and again, emptying the entire charge into the trio of offending creatures. Heads exploded, limbs were severed, and two of them fell over the rail to fall into blackness. The other keeled over backwards and crashed into the deck, twitching once before falling completely motionless.

When the gondola came to a stop against the platform seconds later, Isaac did his best to trample all over the corpse to ensure it posed no threat. The stacks nearby held a bunch of crates, and so he walked on over and searched the ones that looked unmolested. Inside, he found a few more plasma charges for his cutter and another stasis unit. Thanking his luck, he pressed on.

Something on the ground, at the top of the ramp, flashed at him. It wasn't overly bright, but in the darkness of the engineering section it stood out like a star in space. Isaac bent low to pick it up, exposing himself to attack for only an instant and fully aware of it. Turning the object over in his hand, it saw it was a bloody log chip. The body next to it had obviously either recorded it or was taking it somewhere. Isaac slipped it into the reader in his RIG and listened while he walked.

"_Never should have let him live. _Never_ should have let him live."_

"_Shut it, Danvers! Shut … it! Engineering log; Temple reporting. Someone has shut off the fuel lines to the primary engine, and damaged the valves in the process. They need to be repaired before I can reopen them, but we're running out of time. With the engine offline, orbit decay will begin in less than ten hours. I just can't understand who would do this. If it's one of those crazy Unitologist bastards, I'll break their neck!"_

"_Henderson said they were coming. We never should have let him live."_

"_Shut up, Danvers. Help me with the tools! Temple out."_

"Unitologists? Jacob you idiot!" Jacob Temple was someone Isaac knew well. They'd been friends working in the engineering section when he'd been stationed on the _Ishimura_. He'd been known for his wild theories, but he was a great engineer. It was even said that Temple would make chief if he stayed on board the _Ishimura_ for a few more years. This … Danvers, though, was someone new. Isaac had never heard the name even in passing during his tour aboard. He reasoned that the engineer had been assigned to the crew after Isaac had left.

Isaac pressed on, despite the distraction; walking past a vent that was busted outwards, around a few corners and over the squelchy remains of a few engineers who hadn't gotten away from the creatures fast enough.

"Hammond," he said, keying his comm. unit in to the _Kellion_'s crew channel. "I'm at the fuel station in engineering. I picked up a log chip on my way here from one of the engineers." Isaac knew there was no need to mention Temple. Hammond would have no idea who that was unless he'd been given a full list of the Ishimura's crew. "Apparently the fuel was shut off on purpose—sabotage. The valves have been damaged but I should be able to reroute through secondaries from here. I'll let you know if I need any help."

"_That's fine, Isaac. Be quick about it. I don't know how long I can hold my position here._"

"Got it. Any word on Miss Daniels?" He had to ask, though there was a part of him that didn't particularly care right at that moment—not while there were more pressing issues to see to first.

"_No, not yet. I'll let you know when that changes. Hammond out._"

The comm. line went silent again. Isaac sighed and rounded another corner. The valve controls were just in front of him now. A deactivated holo control panel was to the right of it.

The release was a simple mechanism. Straight up and down, it was only slightly taller than Isaac was. The lever that would release fuel through the valves into the engines was at the top of the slide. It needed to be on the bottom, where it would slot into the circuit and trip the release. So Isaac did that; he reached up with both hands and pulled down on the lever until it was securely slotted into the circuit at the bottom. The entire panel glowed, and a light flashed from the ceiling of the cavernous chamber beyond.

An alert sounded and an automated voice came over the announcement speakers. "_Refuelling sequence activated._"

He backtracked across the chasm and took another turn, passing storage rooms and stepping over empty crates thrown over the floor. Down the bottom of a sloping walk, he saw another release, and headed for it. He pulled down on this release same as the one on the other side of the engineering section and waited for the audible _click_ that signified it was in place.

Once again, lights flashed and an alert went off, preceding the announced, "_Refuelling sequence activated. Sufficient fuel to fire primary engine._"

Isaac's comm. blinked and he answered it right away. "_Whatever you did, it's working, Isaac._" Hammond's voice was crackly over the link this time, as if something was temporarily disrupting communications. "_I have a fuel reading. It's only quarter-full, but that should be enough to restore orbit once you bring the engines online. What the hell?_"

"Hammond? What is it?"

A sigh was the first response he got. Then, "_False alarm. I thought I saw something._" And then he was gone again.

"For fuck sake," Isaac swore, annoyed by the sudden severing of the link. He'd have to have words with Hammond about that when he met up with him on the bridge. But first things first … the engines needed to be restarted.

He headed back to the control room via a nearby corridor, and came out of it just outside the central control room. Through the window was a sight he was hoping he wouldn't have to see again so soon—if ever. Another of the batlike creatures was in there, its fleshy wings wrapped around the corpse Isaac had seen in the chair before. The long spike had drilled its way deep into the skull of the body and both it and the thing holding it semi-upright were twitching madly on the spot.

Isaac restrained the urge to vomit again on the spot. It was disgusting to have to watch this again so soon after he'd seen it happen to Captain Mathius. Yellow gunk oozed out around the spike and bubbled out from the mouth. Isaac had no idea what it was, but he knew it wasn't normal to the human condition.

As soon as it had started, it was over. The thing released the body and flew away to find another victim. The body continued to twitch and writhe on the floor when it had been abandoned, and Isaac watched, disgusted and horrified, as the changes began. Soon, even they were over, and the body was barely even human anymore.

Without supporting itself with its arms, it swung up onto two horribly fleshy feet and turned to look at him. Both of its human eyes were intact, but its jaw hung loosely from where it had been. Tissue and fat had atrophied, giving it a somewhat mummified look, and the long spikes protruding from its shoulders glistened with blood.

Knowing he was going to have to go in there anyway to get to the centrifuge, Isaac steeled his resolve and loaded another charge into the plasma cutter. Then he rounded the control room and opened the door for entry.

Immediately, he was set upon by the both of them. The walker lunged at him with a furious scream, but Isaac dropped it with two shots—one that severed both legs and one that blew its head into tiny chunks all over the wall behind it. The flier came at him faster after that, its long spike extending from the top of its body, barbed and dripping with that yellow gunk. Isaac fired three shots into the thing's torso before he scored a fourth hit at the base of the spike. The thing snapped off and the flier dropped to the deck and hit with a wet sound. Isaac stomped on it several times to make sure it wouldn't threaten him again before he went on.


End file.
